Housing Mobility Part 3: What to do?

In part three of this blog series by Alexander Polikoff, we consider the opportunities for “getting children out of harm’s way.”  Click here to read the first post, which addresses the history of housing mobility, and click here to read the second post, which examined the effects of concentrated poverty on young children.  For those wishing to delve more deeply, source materials are provided at the end of each post.

What to Do?

What can society do about this ongoing destruction of the lives of African American children?  Here are some possibilities, and the difficulties each faces.

(1) Undo the residential segregation that is the root cause of the problem? Volumes of history explain how deeply entrenched and intractable is this root cause. Data show that for decades there have been only very modest changes in the segregation of African Americans, and virtually none at all in the big cities in which most African Americans live. Segregation in schools, closely linked to residential segregation, is actually increasing.

(2) Revitalize concentrated poverty neighborhoods?  Despite often heroic efforts, multiple studies show that after a half century of trying, precious few revitalizing initiatives have been successful. (In any event, revitalization doesn’t—because at very best it takes so long—benefit current generations of children.)

(3) Enable African American children to attend middle class schools? Though this can be successful in smaller school districts, it is not feasible in the large segregated cities in which most African Americans live.

(4) Housing mobility? We’ve described the challenges and they are considerable. But Gautreaux, Baltimore and Dallas mobility programs show that it has been and can be done at the scale of thousands of families.

Which is to say that of the four remedial approaches listed, mobility is the most “practical.” As to the objection that spending money on mobility means serving fewer families, there are these answers. First, vouchers may be viewed as serving two groups of families: those in desperate need of shelter, any shelter; and those in desperate need of escaping concentrated poverty. Given what we now know about the grievously harmful lifelong effects of growing up in concentrated poverty, it is not sound policy to structure the voucher program   to serve only the first group. Second, setting realistic ceiling rents to avoid overpaying in distressed neighborhoods will ameliorate some of the “extra cost”.

Third, the concern about maximizing the number of families served must be tempered by HUD’s basic goal of providing decent housing in a decent environment. A recent study, examining voucher programs in the fifty most populous metropolitan areas, comes to the disheartening conclusion that “vouchers have actually perpetuated the concentrated poverty and racial segregation that they are intended to challenge.” (Metzger 2014: 544).

Finally, apart from the moral imperative to avoid “destroying hundreds of thousands of lives,” enabling children to grow up in safe neighborhoods with good schools and working families is likely to reduce welfare and criminal justice costs and in the long run to be beneficial, even in a narrow fiscal sense, to the larger society.

Getting Children Out of Harm’s Way

In the Baltimore mobility program, families with children under age eight who live in Baltimore City’s concentrated poverty census tracts are being given a priority for available vouchers, accompanied by high quality counseling and housing search assistance. The results, as in Gautreaux years ago, are beginning to come in. One mother, enabled to move to a Baltimore suburb, puts it succinctly: “I think moving saved my family’s lives.” (McDaniels 2014.)

Source Materials

What to do?

Rothstein, Richard. 2013. “

What to Do?

DeLuca, Stefanie, and Peter Rosenblatt. 2013. “Sandtown-Winchester—Baltimore’s Daring Experiment in Urban Renewal: 20 Years Later, What Are the Lessons Learned?” The Abell Report 26 (8): 1-12.

Engdahl, Lora. 2009. New Homes, New Neighborhoods, New Schools: A Progress Report on the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program. Washington, D.C.: Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC).

Greenberg, David, Nandita Verma, Keri-Nicole Dillman, and Robert Chaskin. 2010. Creating a Platform for Sustained Neighborhood Improvement: Interim Findings From Chicago’s New Communities Program. New York: MDRC.

Heckman, James J., Seong Hyeok Moon, Rodrigo Pinto, Peter A. Savelyev, and Adam Yavitz. 2010. “The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program,” Journal of Public Economics 94 (1–2): 114–128.

Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. 2013. “Mobility Works.” www.inclusivecommunities.net, April.

Kahlenberg, Richard D. 2001. All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public School Choice. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Kahlenberg, Richard D. and Halley Potter. 2014. A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Kubisch, Anne C., Patricia Auspos, Prudence Brown, and Tom Dewar. 2010. Voices From the Field III: Lessons and Challenges From Two Decades of Community Change Efforts. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute.

Rothstein, Richard. 2013. “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March.” Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

Getting Children Out of Harm’s Way

Longworth, R.C. 1992. “Jobs are Lifeline to the Underclass,” Chicago Tribune, May 14.

McDaniels, Andrea K. 2014. “Moving Families to Combat Aftermath of Violence,” Baltimore Sun, December 26.

Polikoff, Alexander. 2014, June. A Moral Imperative for Housing Mobility. Talk delivered as part of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s FHEO Speaker Series, Washington, D.C.

Samuels, Barbara. 2014. “Nowhere to Live Safe’: Moving to Peace and Safety,” Rooflines: The Shelterforce Blog, September 16.

Staples, Brent. 1993. “Editorial Notebook; Confronting Slaughter in the Streets” New York Times, November 5.