Who Moves to Opportunity? Spatial Returns to Housing Assistance and the Effect of Specialized Mobility Programs

Elijah Knaap

In the following paper, I examine the residential trajectories of housing choice voucher holders in the Baltimore metropolitan region. For decades, the Baltimore region has been a laboratory for housing mobility policies, having participated in the Moving to Opportunity experiment during the 1990s and 2000s, and hosting its own unique mobility program from 2003 to present. In addition to its voucher programs, Baltimore is notorious for its legacy of segregation and racial inequality. It was the first city in the United States to enact a racial zoning ordinance, the legacy of which can still be seen today. More recently, the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the resulting public unrest brought issues of the region’s racial and spatial inequality to the front pages of the media, and a 2016 investigation by the U.S. Justice Department found widespread civil rights violations on behalf of the Baltimore police department. With this history as a backdrop, this paper uses a longitudinal multilevel model to study how different household characteristics and different types of vouchers influence whether a household moves into a high-opportunity neighborhood. The results suggest that voucher holders in general, and black households in particular are likely to move into low-opportunity neighborhoods. Specialized voucher programs, like the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BHMP), however, can reverse this trend, significantly. If voucher programs are intended to be used as a vehicle for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, these results suggest that they could incorporate design changes to facilitate improved locational outcomes.