Struggling to stay out of high-poverty neighborhoods: housing choice and locations in moving to opportunity's first decade

Xavier de Souza Briggs, Jennifer Comey and Gretchen Weismann

Housing Policy Debate, 2010, vol. 20, issue 3, 383-427

Abstract: Improving locational outcomes emerged as a major policy hope for the nation's largest low-income housing program over the past two decades, but a host of supply and demand-side barriers confront rental voucher users, leading to heated debate over the importance of choice versus constraint. In this context, we examine the Moving to Opportunity experiment's first decade, using a mixed-method approach. MTO families faced major barriers in tightening markets, yet diverse housing trajectories emerged, reflecting variation in: (a) willingness to trade location -- in particular, safety and avoidance of “ghetto” behavior -- to get larger, better housing units after initial relocation; (b) the distribution of neighborhood types in different metro areas; and (c) circumstances that produced many involuntary moves. Access to social networks or services “left behind” in poorer neighborhoods seldom drove moving decisions. Numerous moves were brokered by rental agents who provided shortcuts to willing landlords but thereby steered participants to particular neighborhoods.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10511481003788745 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:houspd:v:20:y:2010:i:3:p:383-427

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RHPD20

DOI: 10.1080/10511481003788745

Access Statistics for this article

Housing Policy Debate is currently edited by Tom Sanchez, Susanne Viscarra and Derek Hyra

More articles in Housing Policy Debate from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().