Opportunity Areas in Mobility Programs from Gautreaux to Today

• In Event: Housing Mobility Programs for Families with Housing Choice Vouchers: Impact Findings

Abstract

Recent groundbreaking research has documented that neighborhoods significantly impact long-term outcomes for children receiving housing assistance (Chetty, Hendren, and Katz, 2016). These findings have contributed to renewed interest in mobility programs that encourage families with children to move to higher-opportunity areas. Practically, mobility programs must define whether a neighborhood—often a census tract—is an opportunity area to determine eligibility for mobility services.

This paper first discusses the recent, significant advances in empirical (Chetty, et al., 2025) and theoretical (Noelke, et al., 2024) indexes of neighborhood opportunity. It then reviews published reports and articles to document, compare, and contrast how opportunity areas have been designated in major mobility initiatives from the Gautreaux court orders in 1976 to the Moving to Opportunity experiment in 1994-1998 and the Creating Moves to Opportunity program in 2018-2028.

Next, we provide a case study of how opportunity areas were designated for the Community Choice demonstration. Designating opportunity areas requires program implementers to decide what constitutes opportunity for a particular initiative. This involves a tradeoff between competing priorities of high opportunity and meaningful access. Programs aim for opportunity areas to have meaningful vales of characteristics (e.g., low poverty) associated with improvements in children’s long-term outcomes. However, setting criteria that are too stringent could limit the neighborhoods that program participants can move to if designated neighborhoods have too high of rent levels or too few rental units. We also discuss the importance of combining analytical expert assessment of neighborhood opportunity with local knowledge of neighborhood character.

The paper further examines measures of opportunity and access in prior analyses of mobility programs and reports measures used when defining opportunity areas for the Community Choice Demonstration. We conclude with a discussion of how impacts estimated in the various evaluations of mobility demonstrations over time may be related to the definition of opportunity in the programs.

Author

• Samuel Dastrup, Abt Global
  Presenting Author