اختلال محله و خودکفایی اقتصادی فردی: شواهد جدید از یک مطالعه نیمه تجربی

This paper draws on data from the Monitoring Mt. Laurel Study, a new survey-based study that enables us to compare residents living in an affordable housing project in a middle-class New Jersey suburb to a comparable group of non-residents. Building on the theoretical and empirical contributions of the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity studies, we test the hypothesis that living in this housing project improves a poor person’s economic prospects relative to what they would have experienced in the absence of such housing, and that these improved prospects can be explained at least in part by reduced exposure to disorder and stressful life events. We find that residents in the Ethel Lawrence Homes are significantly less likely to experience disorder and negative life events and that this improvement in circumstances indirectly improves the likelihood of being employed, their earnings, and the share of income from work. We find no relationship between residence in the housing project and the likelihood of using welfare.

Does living in an affordable housing development in a middle class suburb improve low-income residents’ economic self-sufficiency? William Julius Wilson’s seminal book, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), refocused social scientists on the importance of neighborhood context for explaining individual-level disparities, an idea that had been emphasized decades earlier by Chicago School sociologists but had fallen by the wayside as social scientists turned their attention to individual- and family-level determinants of human behavior. The Truly Disadvantaged argued convincingly for the harmful effects of living under conditions of concentrated poverty and stimulated a host of studies examining the relationship between neighborhood poverty and human behavior. Most early studies relied on observational data linked to Census tract characteristics to assess the empirical association between neighborhood poverty and a range of individual-level outcomes. Later studies, including Gautreaux and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration project, applied quasi-experimental and experimental methods to the study of neighborhood effects, though, as we discuss later in this paper, certain design and implementation features of these studies undermine their internal and external validity.