MacArthur Grants IPR Faculty Fellow $1.8 Million for Study on Neighborhood Effects

Spring 2007, Volume 29, Number 1

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently awarded IPR Faculty Fellow Greg Duncan and his colleagues $1.8 million for a study on the long-term effects of neighborhoods on low-income youth. The grant is part of the foundation’s recent $25 million investment in housing research.

Jonathan Fanton, the foundation’s president, speaking at a press conference about the overall investment, said, “We expect this research to suggest ways to make U.S. housing policy more effective and efficient. We want it to push our country’s vision beyond incremental policy reform. We want it to provoke more far-reaching, new ideas about the importance of housing and how the net benefits of our investments can best be realized and understood.” 

To illustrate the differences that can exist in neighborhood contexts, Duncan, an economist and the study’s lead principal investigator, cites two stark examples. In the affluent Chicago suburb of Wilmette, almost all of its local youth graduate from high school with a majority attending—and completing—college, he said. In contrast, on Chicago’s disadvantaged south and west sides, the dropout rate surpasses 20 percent in one out of four public high schools in this area.

Duncan points out that the same pattern holds for homicide. Murder rates in some of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods are about ten times the national average, or 60 to 70 per 100,000 people. In 2002, Wilmette’s homicide rate was exactly zero.

“Understanding why such patterns are affected by neighborhood contexts is vital to how we craft policies on housing, education, and local development,” Duncan said. “The need is urgent given that the number of Americans living in high poverty neighborhoods doubled between 1970 and 2000.”

Duncan and his colleagues, Lawrence Katz and Ronald Kessler of Harvard University, Jeffrey Kling of the Brookings Institution, and Jens Ludwig of Georgetown University, propose to examine these effects by using a random-assignment demonstration program, Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which tracks 4,600 public housing families in five U.S. cities. The MTO study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, follows a treatment group offered assistance to move to more affluent neighborhoods—with poverty rates of 10 percent or less—and a control group that was not offered such assistance. Previous findings have indicated “better neighborhoods, better outcomes” for comparable groups of children. Yet Duncan and his co-investigators found that the 2002 data painted a much more complicated picture.

They found that the only effect that seems to carry over to female adults is an improvement in their mental health. On average, young men who moved because of MTO seemed to do worse in terms of risky and criminal behavior.

The researchers propose to collect new data on 2,444 youth, now 10 to 14 years old, who were newborns to five-year-olds at the time of random assignment. The investigators think that this group might be the most susceptible to environmental changes, according to recent child development findings. They will investigate several outcomes for the children, including education, mental and physical health, and delinquent, risky, or problem behavior.  The researchers will also interweave the MTO data with school records, arrest histories, and possibly biomarker data for health information.

“Assessing whether the large changes in neighborhood environments induced by MTO during early childhood are positive and sustainable could provide key insights on how to improve life chances for disadvantaged children living in some of our most distressed neighborhoods,” Duncan said.

Duncan is Edwina S. Tarry Professor in Education and Social Policy.