The Impacts of New Neighborhoods on Poor Families: Evaluating the Policy Implications of the Moving to Opportunity Demonstration

he U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration, or MTO, is a large, federally funded social experiment designed to test whether improved neighborhood opportunities may significantly affect the life chances of lowincome public housing residents. This paper provides the first systematic overview of the design of the MTO and describes its key features. The paper also offers the first cross-site analysis of research findings and explores the MTO’s relevance to social science research concerning housing and neighborhood effects. We begin with the social science background to MTO and discuss the purposes of the demonstration. We then describe the key features of the demonstration and how its experimental design addresses methodological issues that have long limited neighborhood effects research. The implementation of the demonstration and how that implementation shapes and limits the research is discussed next, followed by a description of the major research results from a number of MTO studies. We conclude with a discussion of future research needs and policy issues.