2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

308 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Although the challenges of establishing causality in neighborhood
effects research are widely appreciated, the number of practical solutions
to date is limited. One important innovation that has garnered
a lot of attention is the use of housing vouchers allocated by lottery to
induce residential mobility to better neighborhoods. This exogenous
influence, like random assignment in experiments, provides leverage on
the problems of selection and reverse causality. The Moving to Opportunity
experiment was designed with these methodological issues in mind
(Goering and Feins 2003). Residents of public housing in five cities were
offered an opportunity to be randomized into (1) a treatment group
that received a housing voucher and counseling to help residents move
to a neighborhood with less than 10 percent poverty, (2) a group that
received a housing choice voucher that could be used anywhere (Section
8 control), or (3) a control group that did not receive a voucher.
Numerous studies have been published from follow-up data collected
over many years following randomization to assess the impact of the
treatment (i.e., a voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood) on
outcome measures for children and adults in these households. The findings
regarding the impact on outcomes have been mixed. Despite the
treatment group living in higher-quality housing and neighborhoods
with lower poverty and crime, no significant differences between treatment
and control groups were found for household employment levels
and income (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2012) or children’s educational success
(Sanbonmatsu et al. 2006). With respect to heath, adults in the treatment
groups compared favorably with controls on a number of health
measures (Sanbonmatsu et al. 2012). Health benefits for children were
less uniform, with the most consistent positive results being on behavioral
health outcomes for female, but not male, adolescents (Kling, Ludwig,
and Katz 2005). Researchers are continuing to mine the Moving to
Opportunity data to tease out the nuances of the effects and the mechanisms
responsible for them.
Although the randomized mobility experiments have the important
advantage of removing selection bias from impact estimates, they have
several limitations (Sampson 2008). An important limitation for those
interested in improving neighborhoods is that the households eligible for
these experiments had to live in public housing prior to randomization,
but public housing residents represent only a small portion of the population
living in disadvantaged circumstances. In addition, even though
the experimental group moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods, they