HCI: Moving Public Housing Residents to Middle-Income Neighborhoods: Effects on Children and Youth

This project examines the impact of neighborhood change (moving from high-poverty, predominantly minority neighborhoods into more affluent neighborhoods) on low-income parents and their children. Following a federal court order to remedy long-standing racial segregation in public housing and in schools, the city of Yonkers, NY built 200 units of low-rise public housing in mostly white, middle-income neighborhoods. Subsequently, a group of very low-income, mostly African-American and Latino families was moved into this housing between 1992 and 1994. This project would comprise a 2-year follow-up study of these families, who will be re-interviewed to examine short-term adaptation to their new neighborhoods. This project will permit a closer examination of the human capital and other social factors thought to mediate the impacts of neighborhood on the social attainment of families. Several factors make this an exceptionally rich longitudinal data set for analyzing neighborhood effects: the project combines the best outcome measures of previous survey studies on housing mobility with social process and social interaction measures highlighted in a long tradition of ethnographic research on neighborhoods; a quasi-experimental design is used to minimize selection bias; a large breadth of measured variables is employed; a high survey completion rate (90%) was attained at baseline; multiple levels of data collection (parents, children and youth) are used; detailed neighborhood ecology data beyond the census data typically used in this form of research is available; and the inclusion of a significant sub-population of Latinos and African-Americans is possible. The project is relevant to a number of the research priorities central to the Human Capital Initiative, especially those related to workforce, neighborhoods and families.