The Impacts of New Neighborhoods on Poor Families: Evaluating thePolicy Implications of the Moving to Opportunity Demonstration

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s(HUD) Moving to Opportunity for Fair HousingDemonstration, or MTO, is a large, federally funded socialexperiment designed to test whether improved neighborhoodopportunities may significantly affect the life chances of lowincomepublic housing residents. This paper provides the firstsystematic overview of the design of the MTO and describes itskey features. The paper also offers the first cross-site analysis ofresearch findings and explores the MTO’s relevance to socialscience research concerning housing and neighborhood effects. We begin with the social science background to MTO anddiscuss the purposes of the demonstration. We then describethe key features of the demonstration and how its experimentaldesign addresses methodological issues that have long limited neighborhood effects research. The implementation of thedemonstration and how that implementation shapes andlimits the research is discussed next, followed by a descriptionof the major research results from a number of MTO studies.We conclude with a discussion of future research needs andpolicy issues...