Pubdate: Thu, 28 Dec 2006
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Page: Page A1, Front Page
Copyright: 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Authors: Jon E. Hilsenrath and Rafael Gerena-Morales

SCENE CHANGE

How Much Does a Neighborhood Affect the Poor? Government Test Tracks 
Families Who Moved; Girls Flourish, Not Boys

Ms. Grayson's One-Way Ride

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. -- A decade ago, Lydia Grayson got as far away 
from her drug-addled, East Harlem housing project as she could. At 
the time, she was a 28-year-old mother of three, and, she says, a 
drug user. She took a federal housing voucher and packed her family 
on a Greyhound bus with one-way tickets to North Carolina.

Climbing out of poverty hasn't been as easy as getting on the bus. 
She says her life is now drug-free and more stable, and her children 
are growing up in a better environment. Yet in many ways, her 
struggles traveled with her.

"You really need to have a focus to get out of the ghetto," says Ms. 
Grayson, a New York native.

Her experience offers clues to a question society has wrestled with 
for years: Can a family escape poverty by getting out of the 
neighborhood where it takes root? It also sheds light on the 
government's shifting efforts to use housing policy as a solution to poverty.

A $16 billion federal infrastructure has built up around housing 
vouchers designed to give poor families more choices about where to 
live. About two million families currently use "Section 8" vouchers 
that allow them to move with subsidized rent. Since 1993, the 
government has been demolishing urban housing projects and forcing 
families to resettle in other places, sometimes with vouchers.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, nearly 30,000 families, many 
extremely poor, turned to the federal government for vouchers after 
they were displaced, according to the Department of Housing and Urban 
Development.

Ms. Grayson's move was part of a government test designed to study 
the effects of a new neighborhood on poverty in the way a researcher 
studies the effects of a new drug.

Beginning in 1994, the federal government offered a lottery for 
housing vouchers to families in five major cities. Families were 
randomly assigned to different groups. One group received vouchers to 
be used specifically to subsidize rents in neighborhoods where 
poverty was low. About 860 families eventually moved.

Another group, of 1,440 families, wasn't offered vouchers and, 
initially at least, stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods. Researchers 
have since tracked and compared the fortunes of the two groups.

The program, called Moving to Opportunity, was administered by HUD. A 
private firm called Abt Associates was contracted to track 
participants. Researchers at Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern and 
other institutions played a role in designing studies related to the 
program and analyzing the data.

When the program was launched, housing vouchers were seen as a 
promising antidote to urban poverty. Researchers had pinpointed 
ghettos as a culprit in the worsening fortunes of many poor, minority 
families. Free them from the poisonous cocktail of drugs and crime 
brewing in city ghettos, scholars reasoned, and the families would 
have a chance to leave poverty behind.

But results show that may only partially be true. "It would have been 
wonderful to have discovered the magic bullet," says Jeffrey Liebman, 
a Harvard economist who has studied the program.

Findings, he says, were more complicated. Among them: boys whose 
families moved actually fared worse than boys who stayed in bad 
neighborhoods. Girls, however, fared significantly better. Adults 
felt better, physically and mentally, than those who stayed behind, 
but didn't do better financially.

The Moving to Opportunity program, started in 1994, was a mix of 
liberal and conservative policy: hatched by Republican Jack Kemp and 
implemented by the Clinton administration. But later that year, in 
Baltimore -- one of the five cities participating -- suburbanites 
rebelled against the idea that poor families from troubled 
environments would be flocking to their neighborhoods. Plans to move 
additional families were canceled.

Over time, researchers followed the families who moved, comparing 
them with those who stayed. The fortunes of the families involved 
were surprising: Earnings of families who relocated to low-poverty 
areas averaged just $9,376 in 2001, a half-decade after they moved. 
That's just 3% higher than the $9,108 earned by those in the control 
group, a statistically insignificant difference.

Other measures improved. In a 2002 survey of 3,521 adults in the 
program -- most of them women -- 18.5% of people who moved to 
low-poverty neighborhoods suffered bouts of major depression, 
significantly lower than the 26.3% who felt depressed in the control 
group. Mr. Liebman, the Harvard economist, says that's roughly the 
same effect that's seen when depressed people are put on a regimen of 
antidepressant drugs.

Among nearly 800 teenage girls, 83% of those who relocated to 
low-poverty neighborhoods had either graduated from high school or 
were still in school five years after the move, compared with 71% in 
the control group. Alcohol use was lower. Arrest rates were lower. 
And mental-health measures improved. Away from the violence of the 
ghetto, girls seemed to flourish.

Teenage boys didn't. School participation deteriorated and 
property-crime rates, mental distress, and smoking all increased 
among those who moved with the vouchers, compared with teenage boys 
in families who didn't move. For property crime, there were 58 
arrests for every 100 boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods, 
compared with 22 arrests for every 100 boys in the control group.

Because boys hang out more in their neighborhoods, researchers 
expected they would respond well to safer, more-affluent 
environments. Instead, many seemed to feel isolated in the new 
places, or harassed by police, and they acted out.

"It seems like the boys were less able to make social connections to 
their new areas," says Jeffrey Kling, a Brookings Institution 
economist who designed many of the Moving to Opportunity studies and 
interviewed participants.

The results ring true to Zack Sanders, 20. Last year, as part of a 
similar housing-mobility program, he moved with his grandmother to a 
quiet suburban home in Mesquite, Texas, away from the rough 
neighborhoods in and around Dallas where he was raised. His 
grandmother, Diana Sanders, 61, says she relishes the tranquility of 
her new home. Her voucher covers $875 of the $1,325 rent. But Mr. 
Sanders says he misses his old friends and neighborhood, where he 
walked to hamburger joints, played basketball and dominoes, and could 
make quick trips to the mall to talk to girls.

"I feel like I'm on Mars," he says. Most evenings he borrows his 
sister's car and drives to his old neighborhood, where he hangs out 
until midnight.

Yet Mr. Sanders's 9-year-old niece, Desiree Griggs, whom his 
grandmother is also raising, is thriving. She spends hours a day in 
her quiet room, reading and playing with dolls.

"When she goes into her room, nobody bothers her. She can relax," Ms. 
Sanders says. Desiree made the school honor roll, she adds. Ms. 
Sanders, who has a history of high-blood pressure and heart disease, 
says the move has helped her health. In a safer environment, she 
feels less tense and walks 30 minutes a day.

Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, who diagnosed the social 
isolation of the inner-city poor in the 1980s, says some families 
didn't thrive in mobility experiments because they didn't move far 
enough from their old neighborhoods. Some stayed so close that they 
didn't even switch school districts. "If they had been able to move 
children to better school districts," he says, "you might have had 
better outcomes."

Researchers agree that relocating people to combat poverty is a 
complex strategy at best. "What do you do with a program that helps 
some people a lot, and doesn't help others or hurts them?" says Todd 
Richardson, deputy director of HUD's Program Evaluation Division.

Overall, he says, it's better to move people than leave them in giant 
housing projects with high concentrations of poverty, one reason HUD 
has been demolishing public housing. But to make moves successful, 
scholars say, more counseling and support of those uprooted might 
help. Some of the families in the test are still being tracked and 
HUD is about to undertake a study to look at the impacts 10 years after a move.

The experience of Ms. Grayson, the Harlem transplant, shows the kind 
of mixed results they seem likely to find.

She was living on the 15th floor of a housing project when she heard 
about the Moving to Opportunity program in 1996. At the time, she 
says she was on welfare, trying to overcome a crack addiction. Her 
three children were underfed, poorly clothed and surrounded by cocaine users.

When she was selected for the housing voucher, she and her children 
moved to Jacksonville, N.C., where she had a cousin.

Ms. Grayson wanted a different environment for her children. She 
recalls scenes of drug use in her childhood home and drinking malt 
liquor at the age of 11. "She was a pretty tough kid," says John 
Goehring, a retired teacher at the Lakeside School, a Spring Valley, 
N.Y., school for troubled teens she attended. But she was bright, he 
recalls. After she earned a high-school equivalency diploma, he 
received a card from her that read: "I'm so happy. Tears are coming 
to my eyes. I won't let you down."

"I didn't really have a lot of positive people in my life," says Ms. 
Grayson. She started college in New York, but became pregnant with 
her first child, Stanley, and dropped out.

Her move to North Carolina was an almost immediate struggle. The 
Moving to Opportunity program provided some counseling, but it tended 
to focus on those who didn't move far away. Because Ms. Grayson moved 
so far, she was effectively on her own.

On advice from her cousin, she moved to a remote spot about 15 miles 
outside of Jacksonville. She couldn't afford gas to heat her home. In 
the winter, she sat up late shivering and crying. She says she walked 
about two miles to work at a school cafeteria, where she earned $5.15 
an hour. She also got back into drugs, she says. Before her first 
year in North Carolina was up, she left her place and moved with her 
children into a homeless shelter, closer to town.

"That's where the trouble started," says her son, Stanley Grayson, 
now 19. Other children at school started teasing him. He responded by 
skipping school and getting into fights. "That was the worst part of 
my life," he says.

For the next few years, Ms. Grayson moved around Jacksonville, trying 
to find a place to settle with her voucher. She says one 
neighborhood, near a mall, was populated by the kind of drug users 
who made her want to leave New York. A quiet area with one-story 
homes and small yards was too far from work since she didn't have a car.

As they moved, Stanley struggled. When he was 14, his mother sent him 
to Florida where his father lived. He eventually was sent to a 
youth-detention facility on gun-possession charges, he and his mother say.

Stanley says if he had stayed in New York, other family members might 
have kept him out of trouble. In North Carolina, "I felt really 
lonely," he says. "There was nobody I could talk to."

At the same time, Ms. Grayson has changed her life for the better. 
She says she is drug-free, and her two younger children seem to have 
settled into life in North Carolina. Kevin, 16, became involved in 
sports and has a job at a KFC restaurant. His mother says he's 
involved in his school's Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps 
program. Khadijah, 12, is being home-schooled by her mother.

Ms. Grayson says her faith has been a stabilizing force. "If it 
weren't for God, I wouldn't make it," she says. She cites the 
influence of Venice Cross, a preacher who she says helped her 
overcome her drug addiction.

"You can move a person out of the ghetto and into the suburb," says 
Ms. Cross. "But if their brain is still thinking ghetto-thinking, 
they're going to bring the ghetto out to the suburb. You've got to 
change a person's thinking." Ms. Cross, a follower of the World 
Harvest Church, an Ohio-based evangelical group, doesn't have a 
church, so she preaches to a small group in homes and at local parks.

While following Ms. Cross, Ms. Grayson got to know the preacher's 
brother, Joseph, a retired New York City maintenance worker. She 
married him last year.

Earlier this year, they found a small apartment in a two-story 
building. A sign in the parking lot warns visitors against carrying 
handguns. By then, Ms. Grayson had landed a $9.74-an-hour job as a 
record keeper at a nearby hospital. "I never really held down a real 
job" before then, she says.

Ten years after leaving New York, however, challenges remain. In 
July, Ms. Grayson lost her job. She says she missed too much work 
taking care of her son Kevin after he was in a car accident. Her son 
Stanley was released from the correctional facility earlier this year 
and stayed with her for a few months. Stanley, who now lives in 
Florida, has hopes of becoming a rap-music artist.

The family has been helped by her husband's income doing construction 
work, Ms. Grayson says, but it hasn't been enough. In August, she 
started collecting federal unemployment benefits. They will expire 
early in 2007.

Ms. Grayson says she's applied for a few jobs, but hasn't landed 
anything. "Sometimes I get discouraged," she says. "I'd be lying if I 
said I didn't. But you gotta live." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake