Effects of housing vouchers on the long-term exposure to neighbourhood opportunity among low-income families: the moving to opportunity experiment

Tenant-based rental assistance has received much attention as a tool to ameliorate American poverty and income segregation. We examined whether a tenant-based voucher program improves long-term exposure to neighbourhood opportunity overall and across multiple domains-social/economic, educational, an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Housing studies 2023, Vol.38 (1), p.128-151
Main Authors: Kim, Huiyun, Schmidt, Nicole M., Osypuk, Theresa L., Thyden, Naomi, Rehkopf, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child Opportunity Index
Child poverty
Children
Developmental delays
Domains
Families & family life
heterogeneous treatment effect
Housing
Housing authorities
Housing vouchers
Income
Long term
Low income groups
model-based recursive partitioning
moving to opportunity
Neighborhoods
neighbourhood opportunity
Poverty
Public housing
Segregation
Subgroups
Vouchers
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Summary:Tenant-based rental assistance has received much attention as a tool to ameliorate American poverty and income segregation. We examined whether a tenant-based voucher program improves long-term exposure to neighbourhood opportunity overall and across multiple domains-social/economic, educational, and health/environmental-among low-income families with children. We used data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment (1994-2010) with a 10- to 15-year follow-up period and used an innovative and multidimensional measure of neighbourhood opportunities for children. Compared with controls in public housing, MTO voucher recipients experienced improvement in neighbourhood opportunity overall and across domains during the entire study period, with a larger treatment effect for families in the MTO voucher group who received supplementary housing counselling, than the Section 8 voucher group. Our results also suggests that effects of housing vouchers on neighbourhood opportunity may not be uniform across subgroups. Results from model-based recursive partitioning for neighbourhood opportunity identified several potential effect modifiers for housing vouchers, including study sites, health and developmental problems of household members, and having vehicle access.
ISSN:0267-3037
1466-1810
DOI:10.1080/02673037.2022.2112154