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To understand the impact of high poverty neighborhoods on families, researchers collected data from participants at the Boston site of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving To Opportunity (MTO) program, which randomly assigned housing vouchers to applicants living in high poverty public housing projects. This allowed families to move to private apartments, typically in lower poverty neighborhoods. The qualitative fieldwork included observation of Boston's MTO and participant interviews. This work caused researchers to refocus their quantitative data collection on substantially different outcomes, primarily related to safety and health. In subsequent quantitative work, researchers found the largest program effects in the domains suggested by qualitative interviews. The qualitative work led researchers to develop an overall conceptual framework for considering the impacts of impoverished neighborhoods on families and how moves to lower poverty neighborhoods might affect them. They observed that fear of random violence caused parents in inner city neighborhoods to focus significant daily effort on keeping their children safe. Later quantitative research confirmed that the intensity of parental monitoring was reduced among families offered housing vouchers. By listening to MTO families, researchers learned lessons with important implications for housing policy. (Contains 18 references.) (SM)

Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test scores for any age group among over 5000 children ages 6 to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.