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."