EFFECTS OF HIGH-POVERTY NEIGHBORHOODS ON YOUTH (CONTINUATION - Revised) This project seeks to evaluate the long-term effects of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity (MTO) mobility demonstration on youth outcomes, and to also try to learn more about the source of any """"""""neighborhood effects"""""""" on youth. All of the youth in MTO were initially living as young children in public housing in high-poverty urban areas. The unique feature of this study is that by random lottery MTO offered housing vouchers to the families of some youth but not others to relocate to private housing in a less disadvantaged neighborhood. Random assignment of these vouchers generates comparable groups of youth living in different types of neighborhoods that can be used to isolate the causal effects of the MTO intervention and by implication changes in neighborhood contexts. The first stage of this project, about 5 years after random assignment, found that MTO produced beneficial effects for female youth (15-20 in 2002) but had on net detrimental effects for male youth. This application seeks funding to collect and analyze survey data on long-term outcomes (9 to 12 years after random assignment) for youth ages 10 to 20 at the end of 2006 on schooling, employment and delinquency. We also plan to collect longitudinal administrative data on these domains for MTO youth of all ages. These data will be used to address the following questions: 1. What are the long-term causal effects of MTO, and by implication growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood, on youth outcomes such as schooling, employment and delinquency? 2. What are the mechanisms through which MTO and neighborhood context affects youth outcomes? 3. Why do these neighborhood processes differ so dramatically by gender? The survey data collected in this project, as with those collected under our previous NICHD award, will be made available to the scientific community through HUD for secondary analyses. These data and our new results should be of interest to policymakers focused on housing, education, health and community development issues, and to researchers throughout the social and medical sciences.
