Finding and Keeping Affordable Housing: Analyzing the Experiences of Single-Mother Families in North Philadelphia

The location, availability, and quality of housing shapes one\u27s social networks, affects access to jobs, and impacts on social relations within the housing unit. However, access to affordable housing is limited for a significant portion of the population in the urban United States. In this study, I interviewed eighteen African-American and Puerto Rican single mothers in two low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia about how they create and maintain their housing arrangements. Within the constraints of an affordable housing shortage, women told me how they struggle to share housing with others, rehab abandoned properties, live in substandard housing, and remain in unsafe neighborhoods. Though their strategies allow them to currently retain housing, they are not without costs. Idiscuss these findings using the theoretical framework of social capital

Social Ties, Social Support, and Collective Efficacy among Families from Public Housing in Chicago and Baltimore

This paper explores the social ties and capital of women relocating to low-poverty neighborhoods through the Moving to Opportunity program and a regular mover group who did not. Findings suggest the low-poverty movers seldom made close ties in their new neighborhoods; they also had fewer childhood friends and exchanged less support than the regular movers. Many, however, welcomed escaping the constant exchange that characterized their former neighborhoods and moved to areas higher in collective efficacy--experiencing neighborhoods rated high in child supervision, facing less conflictual relations with neighbors, and exhibiting greater trust in others-relative to the regular movers

Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

neighborhood effects; social experiment; mixed methods; youth risk behavior

The origins of unpredictability in life trajectory prediction tasks

Why are life trajectories difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multi-decade longitudinal study. Our sampling and interviewing process were informed by the earlier efforts of hundreds of researchers to predict life outcomes for participants in this study. The qualitative evidence we uncovered in these interviews combined with a well-known mathematical decomposition of prediction error helps us identify some origins of unpredictability and create a new conceptual framework. Our specific evidence and our more general framework suggest that unpredictability should be expected in many life trajectory prediction tasks, even in the presence of complex algorithms and large datasets. Our work also provides a foundation for future empirical and theoretical work on unpredictability in human lives.Comment: 54 pages, 8 figure

Hope or harm? Deconcentration and the welfare of families in public housing

In late 1992, Congress created the HOPE VI program to address the concerns raised by the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing earlier that year. One of the goals of HOPE VI is to demolish troubled public housing, redevelop the sites, and, in the process of redevelopment, relocate the residents to Section 8 housing or other public housing. As this trend toward scattering residents of public housing developments continues on a national level, it is crucial to examine how families manage the upheaval. How will this move from a public housing development affect families\u27 lives? What are social and economic implications for families changing neighborhoods? I used qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how families managed their relocation from a public housing development in Philadelphia. I interviewed a random sample of 41 families with school-age children two years after their moves, talking with adults and teenagers in these families. Over half of these families used a Section 8 voucher when they relocated. Analyzing census and administrative data, I found that families who chose to move with a Section 8 voucher ended up in neighborhoods that were significantly less poor and had more employed adults than families who moved into another public housing development. However, the analysis of the qualitative data indicates that, in the short-term, few of the families have been able to re-build local social ties, regardless of what kind of neighborhood they moved into. This inability to connect with neighborhood social structures has made it difficult for adults and teenagers who moved into less poor neighborhoods to take advantage of the improved opportunities in their new neighborhoods. Furthermore, data from the interviews reveal that many people in the sample had created social ties at their former public housing development, and these ties served as a protective factor against the violence and poverty that they all too often faced. Without local social connections in their new neighborhoods, they feel more vulnerable to economic risks and neighborhood violence

Hope or harm? Deconcentration and the welfare of families in public housing

In late 1992, Congress created the HOPE VI program to address the concerns raised by the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing earlier that year. One of the goals of HOPE VI is to demolish troubled public housing, redevelop the sites, and, in the process of redevelopment, relocate the residents to Section 8 housing or other public housing. As this trend toward scattering residents of public housing developments continues on a national level, it is crucial to examine how families manage the upheaval. How will this move from a public housing development affect families\u27 lives? What are social and economic implications for families changing neighborhoods? I used qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how families managed their relocation from a public housing development in Philadelphia. I interviewed a random sample of 41 families with school-age children two years after their moves, talking with adults and teenagers in these families. Over half of these families used a Section 8 voucher when they relocated. Analyzing census and administrative data, I found that families who chose to move with a Section 8 voucher ended up in neighborhoods that were significantly less poor and had more employed adults than families who moved into another public housing development. However, the analysis of the qualitative data indicates that, in the short-term, few of the families have been able to re-build local social ties, regardless of what kind of neighborhood they moved into. This inability to connect with neighborhood social structures has made it difficult for adults and teenagers who moved into less poor neighborhoods to take advantage of the improved opportunities in their new neighborhoods. Furthermore, data from the interviews reveal that many people in the sample had created social ties at their former public housing development, and these ties served as a protective factor against the violence and poverty that they all too often faced. Without local social connections in their new neighborhoods, they feel more vulnerable to economic risks and neighborhood violence

Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered over 4,000 public housing residents in five U.S. cities the opportunity to move to very low poverty neighborhoods. Results from a survey conducted four to seven years after random assignment showed that boys in the experimental group fared no better or worse on measures of risk behavior than their controlgroup counterparts, while girls in the experimental group demonstrated better mental health and lower risk behavior relative to control group girls. We seek to understand these differences by analyzing data from the survey and from in-depth interviews conducted with a random subsample of 86 teens 14 to 19 years old in Baltimore and Chicago. We find that control group boys, especially in Baltimore, deployed conscious strategies for avoiding neighborhood trouble, in contrast to many experimental boys who had subsequently moved back to higher poverty neighborhoods. Second, experimental group girls¿ patterns of activity fit in more easily in lowpoverty neighborhoods than boys¿, whose routines tended to draw negative reactions from community members and agents of social control. Third, experimental boys were far less likely to have strong connections to non-biological father figures than controls, which may have contributed to behavioral and mental health problems

Neighborhood Effects on Barriers to Employment: Results From a Randomized Housing Mobility Experiment in Baltimore

The Moving To Opportunity randomized housing voucher demonstration finds virtually no significant effects on employment or earnings of adults. Using qualitative data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 67 participants in Baltimore, we find that although the voucher and control groups have similar rates of employment and earnings, respondents¿ relationship to the labor market does differ by program group. Our analysis suggests that the voucher group did not experience employment or earnings gains in part because of human capital barriers that existed prior to moving to a low-poverty neighborhood. In addition, employed respondents in all groups were heavily concentrated in retail and health care jobs. To secure or maintain employment, they relied heavily on a particular job search strategy ¿ informal referrals from similarly skilled and credentialed acquaintances who already held jobs in these sectors. Though experimentals were more likely to have employed neighbors, few of their neighbors held jobs in these sectors and could not provide such referrals. Thus controls had an easier time garnering such referrals. Additionally, the configuration of the metropolitan area¿s public transportation routes in relationship to the locations of hospitals, nursing homes, and malls posed additional transportation challenges to experimentals as they searched for employment ¿ challenges controls were less likely to face