The concentration of poverty is a growing public policy concern, and is particularly severe in public housing projects. The proposed research focuses on American youth and will address the following questions: 1. What are the causal effects of living in a high poverty neighborhood on youth outcomes such as educational achievement and health? 2. What mechanisms within the black box of neighborhoods lead to differences in outcomes? 3. Among families offered the chance to move out of high poverty public housing projects using portable rent subsidy vouchers, what factors lead some to move while others do not move? All of the youth in this study initially resided in public housing projects located in high-poverty, inner city neighborhoods. The unique feature of our research design is that some of these youth subsequently moved with their families to private apartments in lower-poverty neighborhoods, encouraged by receipt of a portable Section 8 subsidy that families received by lottery as part of the Moving To Opportunity demonstration program run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The random assignment of the portable subsidies to some families, while others continued to be eligible only for project-based assistance, generates comparable groups of youths living in different types of neighborhoods that can be used to identify the causal effects of neighborhoods on youth outcomes. The funding requested in this proposal will be used to collect and analyze data about youth ages 12-19, including standard reading and math tests and survey questions about education, employment, delinquency and risky behaviors, and health. Data will be collected in the five cities participating in the MTO demonstration, for an anticipated sample size of approximately 4000 youth.
