New York Times
Income in adulthood for
children whose families moved to a better place
By David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox
and Claire Cain Miller
In the wake of the Los Angeles
riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment
called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to
better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could
study the effects.
The results were deeply
disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in
later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do
better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists
and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable.
Now, however, a large new study
is about to overturn the findings of Moving to Opportunity. Based on the
earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds
that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better
odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.
The feelings heard across
Baltimore’s recent protests — of being trapped in poverty — seem to be backed up
by the new data. Among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where
children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore, the
study found.
The city is especially harsh
for boys: Low-income boys who grew up there in recent decades make roughly 25
percent less as adults than similar low-income boys who were born in the city
and moved as small children to an average place.
Beyond Baltimore, economists
say the study offers perhaps the most detailed portrait yet of upward mobility
— and the lack of it. The findings suggest that geography does not merely
separate rich from poor but also plays a large role in determining which poor
children achieve the so-called American dream.
How neighborhoods affect
children “has been a quandary with which social science has been grappling for
decades,” said David B. Grusky, director of the Center on Poverty and
Inequality at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This
delivers the most compelling evidence yet that neighborhoods matter in a really
big way.”
Raj Chetty, one of the study’s
authors, has presented the findings to members of the Obama administration, as
well as to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, both of whom have signaled that
mobility will be central themes of their 2016 presidential campaigns. After
more than 15 years of mostly mediocre economic growth and rising income
inequality, many families say they are frustrated and anxious about trying to
get ahead.
“The data shows we can do
something about upward mobility,” said Mr. Chetty, a Harvard professor, who
conducted the main study along with Nathaniel Hendren, also a Harvard
economist. “Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems
to matter.”
The places where poor children
face the worst odds include some — but not all — of the nation’s largest urban
areas, like Atlanta; Chicago; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Orlando, West Palm Beach
and Tampa in Florida; Austin, Tex.; the Bronx; and the parts of Manhattan with
low-income neighborhoods.
All else equal, low-income boys
who grow up in such areas earn about 35 percent less on average than otherwise
similar low-income children who grow up in the best areas for mobility. For
girls, the gap is closer to 25 percent.
The former home of the Polk
family in Bellwood, Ill. The fatal
shooting of Latonya Polk's husband there prompted her to move away with her two
children in search of a safer place. Credit Alyssa Schukar for The New York
Times
Many of these places have large
African-American populations, and the findings suggest that race plays an
enormous but complex role in upward mobility. The nation’s legacy of racial
inequality appears to affect all low-income children who live in heavily black
areas: Both black and white children seem to have longer odds of reaching the
middle class, and both seem to benefit from moving to better neighborhoods.
The places most conducive to
upward mobility include large cities — San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake
City, Las Vegas and Providence, R.I. — and major suburban counties, such as
Fairfax, Va.; Bergen, N.J.; Bucks, Pa.; Macomb, Mich.; Worcester, Mass.; and
Contra Costa, Calif.
These places tend to share
several traits, Mr. Hendren said. They have elementary schools with higher test
scores, a higher share of two-parent families, greater levels of involvement in
civic and religious groups and more residential integration of affluent,
middle-class and poor families.
For low-income families, a home
in places with these characteristics is often a financial stretch. Rachelle Hawkins,
a 32-year-old single mother in California, rented an apartment in Contra Costa
late last year after moving from a gritty neighborhood near Oakland and being
homeless for a time. She makes about $29,000 as a customer-service agent in
online banking and faces an annual rent bill of almost $17,000.
But she thinks the burden is
worth it for her children, who are 4 and 6. “I don’t think my kids are going to
remember what we went through,” Ms. Hawkins said. “They are absolutely better
off, just because of the environment.”
In addition to studying the
outcomes of more than five million children who moved, Mr. Chetty and Mr.
Hendren also revisited the subjects of the Moving to Opportunity experiment.
Working with Lawrence Katz, one of the original researchers to study the
program, they analyzed more recent, richer data — and concluded that children
who moved before they were teenagers did indeed benefit economically. (The
original study had found health benefits for both younger and older children.)
The Polk family's new
apartment, in Wood Dale, Ill., is small, but Mrs. Polk and her two teenage
children are pleased with the calmer setting. Credit Alyssa Schukar for The New
York Times
In both studies, the younger
children were when they moved, the better they did. Children were less likely
to become single parents when they grew up, were more likely to go to college
and to earn more. The original research had not been able to follow the
economic outcomes of younger children, because not enough time had passed, Mr.
Katz said.
Still, the more extensive
nationwide data on moving found that older children were also affected by their
neighborhood. The effect was what statisticians call linear: Each additional
year in a different place had roughly the same average effect on a child’s
adult earnings. A teenager’s year in a better neighborhood mattered as much as
a 9-year-old’s year — but 9-year olds still had their teenage years in front of
them.
Some economists who have seen
the new study say that it argues for a new approach to housing policy. Current
policy often forces the parents of young children onto waiting lists for
housing vouchers. It also gives tax incentives to developers who build in poor
neighborhoods, rather than rewarding those who build affordable housing in
areas that seem to offer better environments.
In an interview Friday, Julián
Castro, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said he was excited by
the new data. Mr. Castro said his department had been planning to reallocate
funding, so that some people moving to more expensive neighborhoods would
receive larger vouchers. Currently, the value of vouchers tends to be constant
across a metropolitan area.
The large county on the other
end of the spectrum from Baltimore, with the best odds of escaping poverty, is
DuPage County, Ill., west of Chicago. It contains suburbs where the schools are
considered better and where housing costs more than in Chicago and some
close-in suburbs.
In 2012, Latonya Polk decided
to move there with her son and daughter, then 16 and 15. Her husband had been
fatally shot on the front lawn of their apartment outside Chicago in 2011, in a
crime that remains unsolved, she said.
Briana, her daughter, was
hesitant about leaving her friends, but Mrs. Polk insisted, saying they could
still visit them. “I knew absolutely it would mean better possibilities for my
kids,” she said.
Mrs. Polk, center, with her son
Jovan Nicholson and daughter Briana Nicholson at home in Wood Dale. Credit
Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
Mrs. Polk earns about $40,000 a
year at a company that helps clear goods through customs. She has been able to
afford the move by living in a cramped $1,025-a-month, one-bedroom apartment —
and with help from a county program that gives them about $2,000 a year toward
living expenses.
Her son, Jovan, graduated from
high school last year and is now working, while Briana will graduate this
spring. Both plan to enroll in community college in the next year.
Although most places with
better odds of escaping poverty have higher rent, the researchers did identify
some counties as “upward-mobility bargains.” These include Putnam County, N.Y.;
parts of the Pittsburgh and Altoona areas in Pennsylvania; and, if only
relative to surrounding areas, Contra Costa.
The main innovation of the new
paper — part of the Equality of Opportunity Project, involving multiple
researchers — is its focus on children who moved. Doing so allows the
economists to ask whether the places themselves actually affect outcomes. The
alternative is that, say, Baltimore happens to be home to a large number of
children who would struggle no matter where they grew up.
The data suggests otherwise.
The easiest way to understand the pattern may be the different effects on
siblings, who have so much in common. Younger siblings who moved from a bad
area to a better one earned more as adults than their older siblings who were
part of the same move. The particular environment of a city really does seem to
affect its residents.
The data does not answer the
question of whether the factors that distinguish higher-mobility places, like
better schools and less economic segregation, are causing the differences — or
are themselves knock-on effects of other, underlying causes. “We still need
clarity on that,” Mr. Grusky, the Stanford professor, said.
From her perspective, Ms.
Hawkins, the Contra Costa resident, said that the mixing of people from
different social classes did make a difference.
“It’s all spread out here,” she
said. In her old home near Oakland, entire neighborhoods had high unemployment
and crime, which led people who did have jobs to flee, causing a downward
spiral. “You don’t want to put your kid in harm’s way. That’s just extra
stress.”
For all the benefits that moves
can bring, they are not a solution to poverty, said people who have seen the
new paper as well as the researchers themselves. Finding ways to improve those
neighborhoods, for people who cannot or do not want to move, is also important,
researchers and policy makers said.
“We can’t walk away from them,”
Mr. Castro, the housing secretary, said. “We need a two-pronged approach.”
David Leonhardt reported from
Washington, Amanda Cox from New York, and Claire Cain Miller from San
Francisco. Dave McKinney contributed reporting from Wood Dale, Ill.
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A version of this article
appears in print on May 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Change of Address Offers a Pathway Out of Poverty
