Let me be upfront about my own reading: These two new studies
are the most powerful demonstration yet that neighborhoods — their
schools, community, neighbors, local amenities, economic opportunities
and social norms — are a critical factor shaping your children’s
outcomes. It’s an intuitive idea, although the earlier evidence for it
had been surprisingly thin. As Sean Reardon, a professor of education
and sociology at Stanford, said of the study, “I think it will change
some of the discussion around how where children grows up matters.”
The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Project
Abstract:
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment
offered randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing
projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We
present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children's long-term
outcomes using administrative data from tax returns. We find that moving
to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college
attendance rates and earnings for children who were young (below age 13)
when their families moved. These children also live in better
neighborhoods themselves as adults and are less likely to become single
parents. The treatment effects are substantial: children whose families
take up an experimental voucher to move to a lower-poverty area when
they are less than 13 years old have an annual income that is $3,477
(31%) higher on average relative to a mean of $11,270 in the control
group in their mid-twenties. In contrast, the same moves have, if
anything, negative long-term impacts on children who are more than 13
years old when their families move, perhaps because of disruption
effects. The gains from moving fall with the age when children move,
consistent with recent evidence that the duration of exposure to a
better environment during childhood is a key determinant of an
individual's long-term outcomes. The findings imply that offering
families with young children living in high-poverty housing projects
vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods may reduce the
intergenerational persistence of poverty and ultimately generate
positive returns for taxpayers.
The data from Princeton University: Eviction Lab The Eviction Lab at Princeton University has built the first nationwide database of evictions. Find out how many evictions happen in your community. Create custom maps, charts, and reports. Share facts with your neighbors and elected officials. Here is a guide to using the Eviction Lab in class.
Here is Desmond speaking about his work (about 1 hour).
Excerpt:
Jori and his cousin were cutting up, tossing snowballs at passing
cars. From Jori’s street corner on Milwaukee’s near South Side, cars
driving on Sixth Street passed squat duplexes with porch steps ending at
a sidewalk edged in dandelions. Those heading north approached the
Basilica of St. Josaphat, whose crowning dome looked to Jori like a
giant overturned plunger. It was January of 2008, and the city was
experiencing the snowiest winter on record. Every so often, a car
turned off Sixth Street to navigate Arthur Avenue, hemmed in by the
snow, and that’s when the boys would take aim. Jori packed a tight one
and let it fly. The car jerked to a stop, and a man jumped out. The boys
ran inside and locked the door to the apartment where Jori lived with
his mother, Arleen, and younger brother, Jafaris. The lock was cheap,
and the man broke down the door with a few hard-heeled kicks. He left
before anything else happened. When the landlord found out about the
door, she decided to evict Arleen and her boys. They had been there
eight months.
The day Arleen and her boys had to be out was cold. But if she waited
any longer, the landlord would summon the sheriff, who would arrive
with a gun, a team of boot-footed movers, and a folded judge’s order
saying that her house was no longer hers. She would be given two
options: truck or curb. “Truck” would mean that her things would be
loaded into an eighteen-footer and later checked into bonded storage.
She could get everything back after paying $350. Arleen didn’t have
$350, so she would have opted for “curb,” which would mean watching the
movers pile everything onto the sidewalk. Her mattresses. A floor-model
television. Her copy of Don’t Be Afraid to Discipline. Her nice
glass dining table and the lace tablecloth that fit just-so. Silk
plants. Bibles. The meat cuts in the freezer. The shower curtain.
Jafaris’s asthma machine.
Arleen took her sons—Jori was thirteen, Jafaris was five—to a
homeless shelter, which everyone called the Lodge so you could tell your
kids, “We’re staying at the Lodge tonight,” like it was a motel. The
two-story stucco building could have passed for one, except for all the
Salvation Army signs. Arleen stayed in the 120-bed shelter until April,
when she found a house on Nineteenth and Hampton, in the predominantly
black inner city, on Milwaukee’s North Side, not far from her childhood
home. It had thick trim around the windows and doors and was once Kendal
green, but the paint had faded and chipped so much over the years that
the bare wood siding was now exposed, making the house look camouflaged.
At one point someone had started repainting the house plain white but
had given up mid-brushstroke, leaving more than half unfinished. There
was often no water in the house, and Jori had to bucket out what was in
the toilet. But Arleen loved that it was spacious and set apart from
other houses. “It was quiet,” she remembered. “And five-twenty-five for a
whole house, two bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. It was
my favorite place.”
After a few weeks, the city found Arleen’s favorite place “unfit for
human habitation,” removed her, nailed green boards over the windows
and doors, and issued a fine to her landlord. Arleen moved Jori and
Jafaris into a drab apartment complex deeper in the inner city, on
Atkinson Avenue, which she soon learned was a haven for drug dealers.
She feared for her boys, especially Jori—slack-shouldered, with
pecan-brown skin and a beautiful smile—who would talk to anyone.
Arleen endured four summer months on Atkinson before moving into a
bottom duplex unit on Thirteenth Street and Keefe, a mile away. She and
the boys walked their things over. Arleen held her breath and tried the
lights, smiling with relief when they came on. She could live off
someone else’s electricity bill for a while. There was a fist-sized hole
in a living-room window, the front door had to be locked with an ugly
wooden plank dropped into metal brackets, and the carpet was filthy and
ground in. But the kitchen was spacious and the living room well lit.
Arleen stuffed a piece of clothing into the window hole and hung ivory
curtains.
The rent was $550 a month, utilities not included, the going rate in
2008 for a two-bedroom unit in one of the worst neighborhoods in
America’s fourth-poorest city. Arleen couldn’t find a cheaper place, at
least not one fit for human habitation, and most landlords wouldn’t rent
her a smaller one on account of her boys. The rent would take 88
percent of Arleen’s $628-a-month welfare check. Maybe she could make it
work. Maybe they could at least stay through winter, until crocuses and
tulips stabbed through the thawed ground of spring, Arleen’s favorite
season.
There was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, Sherrena Tarver.
Sherrena, a black woman with bobbed hair and fresh nails, was loaded
down with groceries. She had spent $40 of her own money and picked up
the rest at a food pantry. She knew Arleen needed it.
Arleen thanked Sherrena and closed the door. Things were off to a good start.
