Education Week - March 26, 2014 - 21

TO DAY CARE:
Kourtney Mills and her
boyfriend, Troy Bakker,
walk to the bus stop to
take their children to
their day-care center.
Their building borders
Capitol Hill, a Washington
neighborhood that is
populated with many
young professionals.
Ms. Mills is a full-time
student in a medicaltechnician
program.
Few Academic
Benefits Found
In Relocating
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19
assigned neighborhood public schools than
their higher-income peers. It can be complicated
and time-consuming to locate a charter,
magnet, or out-of-boundary school, and
issues like transportation make it harder.
Moving to Opportunity
Nationally, various federal and local
demonstration projects have had mixed
success in producing academic benefits for
students by relocating low-income families
to low-poverty neighborhoods and
schools.
Starting in 1994, the federal Moving to
Opportunity for Fair Housing demonstration
program offered 4,600 randomly selected
low-income families with children
living in five cities-Baltimore, Boston,
Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York-
housing counseling and special vouchers
to relocate to census tracts where fewer
than 10 percent of households earned less
than the federal poverty measure. In a
10-year study, researchers compared various
outcomes for those families with outcomes
for a control group of families that
were given traditional Section 8 housing
vouchers.
Studies of the program's impact found
few statistically significant effects on
participating children's educational outcomes.
Many children remained in their
original schools, and those who did transfer
often moved into schools that weren't
much more economically integrated, researchers
concluded.
And a study by researchers from the
Harvard School of Medicine, published this
month in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, concluded that the mobility
experiment may even have had negative
mental-health effects for boys who participated.
Compared with boys in the control
group, the boys whose families relocated
to low-poverty areas were diagnosed with
depression and conduct disorders at higher
rates. Girls in the relocated group had lower
rates of those conditions than girls in the
control group.
Researchers suggested that boys may
have lacked the social skills to cope after
moving to a new, significantly different
neighborhood. They also speculated that
adults in the new neighborhoods saw the
boys as threatening, while they saw the
low-income girls as people in need of help
and support.
Even when they are given a chance for
change, some low-income families say the
benefits of maintaining social and supportive
relationships in their existing
neighborhoods outweigh the benefits of
relocating, said Lisa A. Sturtevant, the executive
director of the Washington-based
Center for Housing Policy.
"There's this question of investing in
low-income communities versus giving
families an opportunity to move out of
them," she said. "I think the answer is
that we need to do both."
Changing Neighborhoods
More recent efforts to transform neighborhoods
themselves by replacing older
housing projects with mixed-use developments
have sparked tense policy debates.
On the one side, developers and civic
leaders have said such projects promote
diversity and lift values of surrounding
properties. On the other side, neighborhood
activists say such efforts dislocate
residents from rare housing units and
disrupt the culture of established neighborhoods.

Those overhaul efforts have taken variNUMBERS
AT A GLANCE
1.2 million
Number of homeless students reported by
U.S. schools in 2011-12
19.3 million
Number of U.S. households that were
potentially eligible for income-based rental
assistance in 2011
4.6 million
Number of U.S. households that
received income-based rental
assistance in 2011
SOURCES: U.S. Department of Education;
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development 2011 American Housing Survey;
Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard
University
ous forms, starting with special grants for
urban renewal when HUD was created in
1965. But, with limited budgets for capital
improvements and maintenance, many of
the country's existing traditional publichousing
units were in need of repair by
the 1980s.
A 1992 report by the National Commission
on Severely Distressed Public
Housing concluded that 86,000 of the
nation's 1.3 million public-housing units
could be considered "severely distressed,"
referring to the physical deterioration of
buildings, high rates of serious crime,
and an array of poor social outcomes for
residents, such as high dropout and unemployment
rates.
The $6 billion HOPE VI, or Housing Op-
portunities for People Everywhere program,
which started in 1993, sought to
take advantage of the momentum created
by young professionals moving into
neighborhoods once considered unappealing.
The federal program provided block
grants for local authorities to work with
private developers to tear down "severely
distressed" public-housing projects and
replace them with dense, mixed-income
developments that are pedestrian-friendly
and accessible to public transit. The program
led to the demolition of 100,000 severely
distressed units, HUD said.
Critics of the program said public-
housing residents displaced by the new
construction rarely returned to their old
neighborhoods, in part because developers
weren't required to create a new low-income
unit for every one they demolished.
Secretary Donovan acknowledged that
criticism in a July 2009 speech at the National
Press Club.
"As we build on HOPE VI, the next generation
of housing policy must not penalize
an extremely low-income family for the
housing market they live in," Mr. Donovan
said.
The Obama administration has a replacement
for HOPE VI, the Choice Neighborhoods
program, which awarded its
first grants in 2010. The program dovetails
with other Obama administration
interagency efforts-such as Promise
Neighborhoods and Promise Zones-and
it encourages community involvement
in planning and collaborative measures
to improve schools alongside housing in
affected neighborhoods. The cooperative
approach was inspired in part by the Harlem
Children's Zone, a community based
"cradle to career" program for poor children
in New York City.
The agency's budget also includes
funds to maintain existing public housing
facilities.
"If a century of housing policy has
taught us anything, it's that if there isn't
equal access to safe, affordable housing,
there isn't equal opportunity," Mr. Donovan
said.
Coverage of educational equity and school
reform for this series is supported in part by
a grant from the HOPE Foundation and the
Panasonic Foundation. (The Hope Foundation
is not connected with the Hope VI program
cited in the article.) Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content of this
coverage.
EDUCATION WEEK | March 26, 2014 | www.edweek.org | 21
Swikar Patel/Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - March 26, 2014

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