Commentary: MTO's Contribution to a Virtuous Cycle of Policy Experimentation and Learning

When the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration1 began in the mid-1990s, policymakers at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were newly aware of the terrible damage inflicted on families and children living in severely distressed neighborhoods and the role federal housing policy played in concentrating and isolating poor (mostly minority) families in these neighborhoods. Findings from the Chicago Gautreaux experiment suggest that helping families escape from deeply poor neighborhoods and move to neighborhoods of opportunity might dramatically improve their well-being and life chances. At the time, however, few people (whether policymakers, practitioners, or scholars) saw HUD as a source of policy innovation or rigorous experimentation, and federal housing policy was an afterthought in most discussions about antipoverty strategies and welfare reform (Briggs, Popkin, and Goering, 2010).Because reliable answers about what works in public policy are hard to find, labeling experiments like MTO as either "successes" or "failures" is tempting. Did the demonstration prove that using housing vouchers to relocate poor minority families works? If not, did it fail? In fact, MTO succeeded in ways no one anticipated when it was launched, generating valuable lessons and raising new questions about the effects of neighborhood distress and the potential role of assisted housing mobility. Findings to date have spurred successive rounds of policy innovation and research that test new hypotheses about how, where, and for whom neighborhoods matter and how both housing mobility and neighborhood revitalization can improve outcomes for families and kids. In addition, MTO has dramatically raised the profile of HUD (and federally subsidized housing) as an important contributor to both innovation and learning in the world of antipoverty policy.Unexpected Improvements in Health and Mental HealthThe initial hypotheses about the potential benefits of assisted housing mobility did not anticipate health improvements. The earliest exploratory studies of MTO families suggested, however, that moving out of dangerous and chaotic environments (and into better quality housing in safer neighborhoods) might yield important health and mental health benefits (see, for example, Goering and Feins, 2003). MTO researchers responded by focusing more quantitative and qualitative attention on these outcomes and the processes driving them, thereby enriching a growing body of evidence from other fields about the damaging effects of trauma and stress on children's physical, emotional, and intellectual development. MTO findings have also triggered related investigations of the health effects of neighborhood crime and violence, in particular the possibility that girls suffer from "sexually corrosive" neighborhood environments (Popkin, Leventhal, and Weissman, 2010).The significance of health outcomes in MTO research (see Sanbonmatsu et al., 2011) - combined with other research on the costly spillover effects of chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, asthma, and depression - has already influenced policy and practice. This research has heightened awareness among housing policymakers and practitioners about health risks facing the families they serve. Both HUD and public housing agencies have begun giving much greater attention to the physical and mental health of public and assisted housing residents, partnering with health-service providers to improve healthcare access and targeting conditions in housing units, properties, and neighborhoods that may undermine residents' health.2Disappointing Results for Education and EmploymentMTO teaches that, although many high-poverty neighborhoods lack both good schools and proximity to good jobs, moving to a low-poverty neighborhood does not guarantee that children will attend high-performing schools or that their parents will gain access to secure, well-paying jobs. …