The Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies

In the 1990s housing mobility became a popular strategy for improving the lives of the poor. That decade, Los Angeles was chosen to participate in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Moving to Opportunity” demonstration project that encouraged poor persons living in segregated low-income neighborhoods to move to neighborhoods with reduced racial segregation and less concentrated poverty. Congress expanded that program and established the Housing Choice Voucher program with the intent of deconcentrating poverty by increasing tenant residential mobility. This thesis evaluates the program’s success in deconcentrating low-income households in Los Angeles.