YONKERS PROJECT: MOVING PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS

DESCRIPTION: The overall goal of this proposed research is to examine 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 two hundred 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 two-year follow-up study of those 317 African American and Latino families (both those who moved to a new neighborhood and those who did not) of Yonkers who have agreed to participate in this study and were interviewed once at baseline. They will be reinterviewed two years later to examine short-term adaptation to their new neighborhood. NIH support will enable the investigators to move beyond a more narrowly focused program evaluation of mobility programs, like Yonkers and Gautreaux -- whose basic premise is that moving to more affluent neighborhoods will promote the economic self-sufficiency of low-income families -- to a closer examination of the human capital or other social factors hypothesized to mediate the impacts of neighborhood on the social attainment of families. It will also allow the investigators to examine the effects of neighborhood residence on children and their families in the context of this study. Specific aims of the study are to: (1) assess neighborhood effects by comparing the 188 who moved (the "mover" families) in their unit-based housing in middle-class neighborhoods with the 149 families who stayed (the "stayers") in their low-income, mostly African American and/or Latino neighborhoods, on key outcomes including education, job attainment, job stability, parenting and family functioning, and health status; (2) compare mover children (7-11 years of age) and youth (12-17 years of age) with stayer children and youth on key outcomes, including school achievement, juvenile delinquency, school engagement, peer networks, and employment; (3) compare effects of moving to a new neighborhood on children (ages 7-11) with those on youth (ages 12-17) so as to assess the significance of developmental stage for neighborhood effects; (4) compare effect on subgroups of movers; (5) describe effects of the physical design and location of the scattered-site housing -- "inward" vs. "outward" -- on behavior and outcome; (6) explore the effects of racially desegregated neighborhood on school preferences (e.g. academic vs. vocational) and the peer group formations of mover children and youth.