Moving to Opportunity
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$19.95 (01)Description
Moving to Opportunity tackles one of America's most enduring dilemmas: the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. Launched in 1994, the MTO program took a largely untested approach: helping families move from high-poverty, inner-city public housing to low-poverty neighborhoods, some in the suburbs. The book's innovative methodology emphasizes the voices and choices of the program's participants but also rigorously analyzes the changing structures of regional opportunity and constraint that shaped the fortunes of those who "signed up." It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements, and limitations of a major social experiment. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its powerful lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.Features
- Based upon 5 years of unique, new research using multiple methods to assess the effects of a major housing mobility experiment
- Uniquely combines in-depth surveys plus mapping and ethnographic research to look deeply into the lives of poor families who engaged with MTO
- Relates to the experience of the poor, minority families displaced by Katrina--and now to those suffering the worst effects of the foreclosure crisis.
Reviews
"Moving to Opportunity insightfully reveals how the fight against ghetto poverty is more than just overcoming economic deprivation. It also involves improving safety and feelings of security and therefore increasing freedom from fear. A number of questions remain about the effects of the MTO experiment. However, the striking reduction in anxiety and depression for women and girls is not one of them. Briggs and his colleagues argue persuasively for a major national commitment to affordable rental housing in safe and livable neighborhoods."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University
"This team of respected researchers has applied scientific rigor and experience-based pragmatism to tackle one of the most difficult subjects in the urban policy field: how to harness economic and housing programs to reduce poverty and to create life opportunities for America's poorest families. The result is analyses and conclusions which are sobering but also promising and hopeful." --Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, CityView and Former Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
About the Author(s)
Xavier de Souza Briggs
is Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House and Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning (on leave) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A sociologist by training, his award-winning research focuses on leadership and democratic institutions, inequality, and racial and ethnic diversity in cities. A former faculty member at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, his books include The Geography of Opportunity
and Democracy as Problem Solving
. He is founder and director of The Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT
and Working Smarter in Community Development
, two popular and innovative online resources for people and institutions worldwide, and his views have appeared in the New York Times
, Salon.com
, National Public Radio, Boston Globe
, and other major media.
Susan J. Popkin
is Director of the Urban Institute's Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development. She is a nationally recognized expert on assisted housing, mobility, and the "hard to house." Dr. Popkin is the lead author of The Hidden War
, has written numerous papers and book chapters on housing and poverty-related issues, and is co-author of the recent book, Public Housing and The Legacy of Segregation
.
John Goering
is a Professor at the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College and is on the doctoral faculty of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of seven books on housing, race and public policy. While at the Office of Policy Development and Research at HUD he helped design and implement MTO, and co-edited the first collection of analyses, Choosing a Better Life?
, on this demonstration.
