Moving to Opportunity

John Goering author Xavier de Souza Briggs author Susan Popkin author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:25th Mar '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Moving to Opportunity cover

If ¨bad¨ neighborhoods are truly bad for children and families, especially the minority poor, can moving to better neighborhoods lead them to better lives? Might these families escape poverty altogether, beyond having a better quality of life to help them cope with being poor? Federal policymakers and planners thought so, on both counts, and in 1994, they launched Moving to Opportunity. The $80 million social experiment enrolled nearly 5,000 very low-income, mostly black and Hispanic families, many of them on welfare, who were living in public housing in the inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Yet five years after they had entered the program, many of the families in the favored ëxperimental¨ group had returned to high poverty neighborhoods. Young women showed big drops in risky behavior and big improvements in mental health, on average, while young male movers did not. The males even showed signs of increased delinquency if they had lived, at least for a time, in the low poverty areas. Parents likewise showed major drops in anxiety and depression-two of the crippling symptoms of being chronically poor in high-risk ghettos-but not in employment or income. And many movers appeared to be maintaining the same limited social circles-mostly disadvantaged relatives and close friends-despite living in more advantaged neighborhoods. The authors of this important and engaging new book wanted to know why. Moving to Opportunity tackles the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. It mines a unique demonstration program with a human voice, not just statistics and charts, rooted in the lives of those who ¨signed up¨ for MTO. It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements and limitations of a major social experiment-and does so at a time of tremendous economic, social, and political change in our nation. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.

a stellar study based on a very important social experiment ... fascinating because the authors present vignettes of the lives of the study participants to illustrate their findings, which are based on rigorous research. What makes the book exceptional is that the authors compare and contrast middle-class arguments (which many of the middle-class readers of this book will hold) with working-class reality. * Katrin B. Anacker, Urban Studies *

ISBN: 9780195392845

Dimensions: 231mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 431g

320 pages