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Moving to Opportunity

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) demonstration began in 1994 as a five-site, federally funded social experiment designed to test whether improved neighborhood opportunities could positively affect the lives of public housing families. MTO made use of housing choice or Section 8 rental vouchers to facilitate the residential mobility of families out of deeply poor inner-city assisted housing developments to low-poverty census tracts in Boston, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Key Policy and Research Assumptions and Decisions

There were a number of key policy choices that helped shape MTO. At its inception, social scientists and policy analysts understood that poverty had become increasingly concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods and that such concentrations may have detrimental effects on the well-being and future opportunities of local residents. Since racially segregated pockets of poverty were acknowledged to be partly the creation of past generations of federal housing policies, it was necessary to learn to what extent rental assistance could help alleviate the worst effects of HUD-engendered poverty, with concomitant programs aimed at inner-city revitalization.

In the early 1990s, there was no convincing research that could demonstrate that moving to a community with lower poverty could have positive effects on the lives of movers. The only prior suggestion that housing mobility could have positive effects first appeared in the 1980s as part of the Gautreaux Program's research. This program made use of Section 8 rental assistance and housing counseling to promote racial desegregation in the city of Chicago. The Gautreaux research suggested that moves to less racially segregated suburban locations were associated with measurable improvements in the lives of children. Children appeared less likely to drop out of school and were more likely to take college-track classes than their peers who moved within the city of Chicago. After graduating from high school, the suburbanized children were also more likely than their city peers to attend a 4-year college and become employed full-time at a job. This evidence was limited in its policy lessons because it emerged from a distinctive, judicially mandated, racial desegregation lawsuit and, even more crucially, because of concern about potential selection bias. Such bias means that if only the most highly motivated families selected suburban locations, then it is uncertain whether the program or the parents’ motivations caused the improvements in children's lives. There was additional concern about exactly how many families may have been missed in the surveys of children's outcomes. The solution to the problem of selection bias was to remove parents’ ability to select their neighborhoods by randomly assigning them to a community. MTO was designed as such an experiment.

Program Design

MTO was authorized by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 to “assist very low-income families with children who reside in public housing or housing receiving project-based assistance … to move out of areas with high concentrations of persons living in poverty to areas with low concentrations of such persons” (Goering & Feins, p. 6). High concentrations of poverty were defined as census tracts where 40% or more of the residents were poor as of the 1990 census. Low-poverty areas were defined as census tracts where 10% or less of the population lived in poverty in 1990. The 40% threshold followed the social science convention for defining deeply poor neighborhoods while the 10% threshold corresponded to the median tract-level poverty rate across the United States in 1990 and was thought to encompass a range of opportunities for families.

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