Response to Review of
Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment

John Goering
City University of New York

Judith D. Feins
Abt Associates

Citation: Goering, John and Judith D. Feins. (2004). “Response to Review of Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment.” Children, Youth and Environments 14(1). Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye.

We appreciate the opportunity to comment and will use this time to address ongoing MTO research.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration- among the most important ongoing demonstrations in American housing policy- is a multi-city, mixed-method research project that is roughly half way through the evaluation process of examining neighborhood effects on the lives and life fortunes of youth and families in the context of an experimental research design. Our book title, Choosing a Better Life? was explicitly ended with a question mark as we were aware of how much more research was both needed and planned.

The small grant research reported in the book has been followed with a large-scale interim evaluation released in 20031 and it is anticipated that a final impacts study will occur around 2007. The interim evaluation, unlike the research for the book, involved standardized cross-site surveys and the use of administrative data for a large panel with roughly 11,000 respondents, including both adults and children.

The first comment is therefore that there are now more current evaluation findings some of which confirm and others that disconfirm the initial results reported in the book. Key among the major consistent effects are the notably lower poverty rates in the neighborhoods into which families first moved and are currently living. Closely related is the now clearer finding that MTO did not explicitly seek and did not achieve racial desegregation along with its deconcentration of poverty. The longer-term consequences of this is an issue of continuing curiosity and debate. While racial desegregation was not among the main motivations for participating families, moving away from extremely high levels of crime was. Reductions in the fear of crime was both the major motivator of their mobility and a major successful reported outcome.

Further, among the major findings that are now clearer and more firmly established is that mothers experienced both reduced mental stress as well as related improvements in obesity. These appear as quite significant alterations in their lives that, we hypothesize, will subsequently lead to other adaptations and improvements. Another domain of results that have surprised many of us is the fact that children have apparently responded differently to the experience of lower poverty. It appears, for reasons that are as yet uncertain, that girls’ overall behavior has substantially improved, including less drinking and smoking and reduced levels of arrest, while the results for boys are less encouraging. They appear to be engaged in more drinking and smoking and in property crime, although there is discussion about how significant the latter finding is.

Among the issues that warrant comment is whether the findings and analysis of the Gautreaux housing mobility program in Chicago correctly established the theoretical foundations for causal analysis of behavioral change as a result of significant residential relocation through the Section 8 program. Gautreaux methodology has been critiqued by others, with the clear sense that response and selectivity bias may have generated an unrealistic level of expectations about how rapidly and in what ways mothers and children will respond to moves to lower-poverty communities. The reviewer therefore correctly cautions about MTO’s designers’ optimism. It was indeed created in the research-driven “euphoria” which early Gautreaux results offered in a policy context starved for viable alternatives to poverty and race concentration.

There is currently an ongoing set of research with which we both are engaged in different ways. One project currently in the field is making use of both qualitative interviews and ethnographic studies to more clearly reveal the manner in which families make use of their neighborhood contexts, how gender differences are experienced differently by setting, and how major institutional options- most notably education and employment- are valued and used by adults and older children with the opportunity to select alternatives to inner-city poverty life course patterns.

MTO was founded in the belief that place and context matter and, preliminarily, it is clear that in some domains it does matter, significantly. Ongoing evaluation and qualitative research will help fashion clearer theoretical and policy understandings for the positive, negative, and the murky findings. MTO is not complete- stay tuned.

Endnote
1. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (2003). Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Interim Impacts Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: HUD, September.

John Goering received his Ph.D. in sociology and demography from Brown University. He is currently a professor at the City University of New York, with appointments the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College and the Ph.D. Program in Political Science at the Graduate Center. His research focuses upon housing, neighborhood development, and race and ethnic issues. He is the author of several dozen articles as well as editor or author of several books including: The Best Eight Blocks in Harlem; Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy; Mortgage Lending, Racial Discrimination and Federal Policy; and Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. At the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center, he co-directed a Mellon Foundation grant in 2003 focused on the interface between international and domestic human rights policies. A book from that project, Wars on Terrorism and Iraq: Human Rights, Unilateralism, and the United States, co-edited with Tom Weiss and Margaret Crahan, will be published shortly by Routledge Press. John previously designed evaluation research on neighborhood change and civil rights issues at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, served on a Congressional committee focused on international migration, and was on the research staff of the White House Initiative on Race in 1997-1998. He has served on the editorial boards of the Urban Affairs Review, New Community, Housing Studies, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Judith D. Feins is a political scientist specializing in housing policy research. She has done extensive research on mobility and housing assistance. She has played a long-term role in the MTO demonstration and directed the MTO interim evaluation.