title: Long-term effects of the Moving to Opportunity residential mobility experiment on crime and delinquency.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Using data from a randomized experiment, to examine whether moving youth out of areas of concentrated poverty, where a disproportionate amount of crime occurs, prevents involvement in crime.
  
  
  METHODS
  We draw on new administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO families were randomized into anexperimental groupoffered a housing voucher that could only be used to move to a low-poverty neighborhood, aSection 8 housing groupoffered a standard housing voucher, and acontrol group. This paper focuses on MTO youth ages 15-25 in 2001 (n= 4,643) and analyzes intention to treat effects on neighborhood characteristics and criminal behavior (number of violent- and property-crime arrests) through 10 years after randomization.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We find the offer of a housing voucher generates large improvements in neighborhood conditions that attenuate over time and initially generates substantial reductions in violent-crime arrests and sizable increases in property-crime arrests for experimental group males. The crime effects attenuate over time along with differences in neighborhood conditions.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings suggest that criminal behavior is more strongly related to current neighborhood conditions (situational neighborhood effects) than to past neighborhood conditions (developmental neighborhood effects). The MTO design makes it difficult to determine which specific neighborhood characteristics are most important for criminal behavior. Our administrative data analyses could be affected by differences across areas in the likelihood that a crime results in an arrest.
authors.affiliation: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sciandra
authors.affiliation: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA lsanbonm@nber.or.
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Sanbonmatsu
authors.affiliation: School of Education, University of California, 2056 Education Building, Mail Code 5500, Irvine, CA 92697, USA gduncan@uci.edu.
authors.forename: Greg J
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Duncan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Human Development and Social Change, New York University and National Bureau of Economic Research, 246 Greene Street, Floor 6E, New York, NY 10003, USA gennetl@nber.org.
authors.forename: Lisa A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Gennetian
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA lkatz@harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Lawrence F
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Katz
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA kessler@hcp.med.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Ronald C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Kessler
authors.affiliation: Congressional Budget Office and National Bureau of Economic Research, 2nd and D streets, SW, Washington, DC 20515, USA jeffrey_kling@nber.org.
authors.forename: Jeffrey R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Kling
authors.affiliation: University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research, 1155 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA jludwig@uchicago.edu.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ludwig
keywords: Crime; Long-term impacts; Neighborhood effects; Poverty; Randomized experiment