DeLuca S, Katz LF, Oppenheimer SC.
"When Someone Cares About You, It's Priceless": Reducing Administrative Burdens and Boosting Housing Search Confidence to Increase Opportunity Moves for Voucher Holders. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 2023;9 (5) :179-211.
Publisher's VersionAbstractUsing in-depth interview data from families and service providers, we examine the success of the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) program in Seattle, focusing on how it reduced many of the learning, compliance, and psychological costs of using housing vouchers so that participants could expand their residential choices. CMTO’s approach of combining information and flexible financial resources with personalized high-quality assistance bolstered participants’ confidence, agency, and optimism for their housing searches in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Accessible, collaborative, pertinent communication from program staff was central to addressing both the psychological costs of the federal Housing Choice Voucher program and families’ experiences in housing and social services. These results provide evidence to inform housing policy as well as to enrich broader scholarship on program take-up, implementation research, and the role of Navigators and service quality in addressing administrative burdens low-income families face while using other social programs.
Harding DJ, Sanbonmatsu L, Duncan GJ, Gennetian LA, Katz LF, Kessler RC, Kling JR, Sciandra M, Ludwig J.
Evaluating Contradictory Experimental and Non-Experimental Estimates of Neighborhood Effects on Economic Outcomes for Adults. Housing Policy Debate. 2023;33 (2) :453-86.
Publisher's VersionAbstract
Although non-experimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this paper compares experimental and nonexperimental estimates from MTO and a parallel analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Striking similarities were found between non-experimental estimates based on MTO and PSID. No clear evidence was found that different estimates are related to duration of adult exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods, non-linear effects of neighborhood conditions, magnitude of the change in neighborhood context, frequency of moves, treatment effect heterogeneity, or measurement, although uncertainty bands around our estimates were sometimes large. One other possibility is that MTO-induced moves might have been unusually disruptive, but results are inconsistent for that hypothesis. Taken together, the findings suggest that selection bias might account for evidence of neighborhood effects on adult economic outcomes in nonexperimental studies.
mto_nonexp.pdf