From the Social Science Research Council

Creating Moves to Opportunity:
Mixed Methods Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

A talk by:
Stefanie DeLuca
Johns Hopkins University

Thursday, September 25, 2025
3:00 - 4:00 p.m. Eastern, via Zoom

"Low-income families often live in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities to get ahead, even when they have housing vouchers that would allow them to move to neighborhoods with more potential for upward mobility. In this SSRC lecture, Johns Hopkins sociologist Stefanie DeLuca will explore why through two randomized interventions. In these experiments, housing voucher recipients were given varying levels of information, financial support, and customized search assistance to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. The treatment increased the share of those moving to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% to 53%. Qualitative interviews with participants in the program showed that the intervention increased families' optimism about new neighborhoods and housing, eased demands on families’ time and attention and addressed their specific needs. The combination of the two experiments and the qualitative data reveal that the customized support and search assistance provided by the program navigator staff was the necessary driver of the experimental impacts, not financial assistance or information alone. These findings imply that many low-income families do not necessarily prefer to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers to housing searches significantly increase residential segregation by income."

Register for the event via Zoom