What moving can change: report

Identification

Title

What moving can change

Label

Offers, moves and policies

Chapter

9.6 (Part IX, Reading the patterns; Reading the patterns)

Question

What do randomized experiments and other designs with a stated identification strategy find about moving families or changing places, and how does that evidence differ from the comparisons in this book?

Dek

Randomized offers of housing vouchers, studies of children whose families moved at different ages, and a trial of help with the housing search find changes for particular families under particular conditions, from 15% to 53% of families moving to high-mobility areas in one trial, and none of them measures what the gradients in this book would become if places changed.

Grain

individuals

Status

draft

Published

28 October 2026

Updated

not revised

Data sources

Published estimates from cited studies. Estimates reported in the cited studies, most of them copied from the chapters that first report them; years: as reported in each study; weights: as reported in each study
Opportunity Atlas. The share of variation across neighborhoods attributed to causal effects, as reported by the Opportunity Atlas authors and in Race, income and mobility; years: 1978-1983 birth cohorts (2018 release); weights: as reported

Canonical URL

https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/what-moving-can-change

Markdown

https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/what-moving-can-change/report.md

BibTeX

@misc{singh2026whatmovingcanchange,
  author = {Singh, Vishal},
  title = {What moving can change},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/what-moving-can-change},
  note = {In ZIP Code Destiny. Published 28 October 2026.}
}

Principal estimates

The facts the dek and the opening prose cite, in order of appearance. Every fact is in the table of all estimates below.

Estimand	Population	Period	Value	Interval	n	Weights	Source	Fact id
Bergman, Chetty, DeLuca, Hendren, Katz and Palmer (2024), American Economic Review 114(5): randomized trial among families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County; the treatment combined information, short-term financial assistance and customized search assistance; share of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area, copied from the abstract and not computed in this build (control group)	families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County, control group of the Creating Moves to Opportunity trial	moves after random assignment, as reported in the paper	15%			none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	cmto_control
Bergman, Chetty, DeLuca, Hendren, Katz and Palmer (2024), American Economic Review 114(5): randomized trial among families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County; the treatment combined information, short-term financial assistance and customized search assistance; share of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area, copied from the abstract and not computed in this build (treatment group)	families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County, treatment group of the Creating Moves to Opportunity trial	moves after random assignment, as reported in the paper	53%			none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	cmto_treat

Findings

In a randomized trial among families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County, 53% of the families offered information, short-term financial help and customized help with the housing search moved to a neighborhood with high upward mobility, against 15% of the families in the control group.[1] That result answers a question the rest of this book cannot. The earlier chapters compare places and the people who already live in them. They show where outcomes are higher or lower and how they move with deprivation, and they cannot say what would happen to a family that moved, or to a place that changed.

This chapter reports the studies the book cites whose designs separate what a place, or a change to it, does for a family from the selection of families into places. It groups them by what was changed: an offer of a voucher, the years a child spent in a place, help with the search for housing, a forced move, and a change to a place or an institution. Each study describes its own population and period, and none of the estimates is pooled with another or attached to a gradient in an earlier chapter.

Questions the designs answer

What was changed	Design	Question it can answer	What it cannot answer
An offer of a housing voucher	Randomized experiment (Moving to Opportunity)	What changed for the families offered the voucher, compared with families not offered it	What any move to any less poor neighborhood would do
The years a child spent in a place	Movers design, comparing children who moved at different ages	How much of the difference between places a child's outcome takes on per year of exposure	Which feature of a place produces the change
Help with the housing search	Randomized experiment (Creating Moves to Opportunity)	Whether assistance changes where families with vouchers move	What the moves do to children's adult outcomes, which the trial has not yet observed
A forced move from public housing	Comparison of children in demolished and nearby buildings that were not demolished	What a displacement out of public housing changed for children	What a voluntary move would change

A fifth group of studies changes a place or an institution rather than who lives there. Those studies are reported in the chapters on the outcomes they measure and are listed in the last section.

An offer of a voucher changed some outcomes for some members of the family

Causal evidenceRandomized housing-voucher experiment

Moving to Opportunity: adults' health and well-being and children's later income

From 1994 to 1998 the Department of Housing and Urban Development randomly assigned families in public housing in high-poverty tracts to a voucher usable only in a low-poverty tract, with counseling, to an unrestricted voucher, or to no voucher. Only 48% of the families offered the low-poverty voucher used it to move.

In a survey of the women in 2008 to 2010, the prevalence of a glycated hemoglobin level of 6.5% or more, a marker of diabetes, was 4.3 (95% CI 0.8 to 7.8) points lower in the group offered the low-poverty voucher than in the control group, and the prevalence of a body-mass index of 40 or more was 3.4 (95% CI 0.4 to 6.4) points lower.[2] A decade or more after assignment, the offer of a move raised a standardized answer to one question about how happy things are by 0.098 (95% CI 0.022 to 0.174) standard deviations, with no detectable change in the adults' economic self-sufficiency.[3]

The children's adult incomes depended on their age at the move. Children assigned the experimental voucher before age 13 had an annual income 14% higher in their mid-twenties than the control group, an intention-to-treat comparison that includes families who did not move. Scaled by take-up, the estimate for children of families who used the voucher is 31%. The estimated effects for children who were teenagers at the move were negative.[4]

The estimates compare groups by the offer they received, and the offer went to volunteers living in public housing in the poorest tracts of large cities. They describe what an offer did for those families. They do not give the change that a move along the full range of the deprivation index would produce, and none of the studies measured life expectancy.

A child's adult income moves toward the destination's with each year spent there

Causal evidenceMovers design

Childhood exposure to a place and adult income

Chetty and Hendren compared children whose families moved between areas when the children were at different ages, including siblings in the same family. The identifying assumption is that the selection that sends a family to a better or worse place does not vary with the child's age at the move, which they test with sibling comparisons, controls for changes in parental income and marital status, and moves that followed displacement shocks. Children's adult income ranks move toward those of children of permanent residents of the destination by 0.04 percentile for each year of childhood spent there and each percentile by which the destination's ranks are higher.[5] A companion paper estimates the causal contribution of each county.[6]

The Opportunity Atlas authors combine the experimental and movers estimates and report that 60% of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects of the neighborhoods.[7]

The design estimates how much of a place's difference a child takes on, and its benchmark is the children of permanent residents at the same parent income. It does not say which feature of a place, its schools, its neighbors, its jobs or its safety, carries the effect, and the share attributed to causal effects belongs to the Atlas outcome and sample, not to the outcomes of other chapters.

Help with the housing search changed where families moved

Causal evidenceRandomized controlled trial

Creating Moves to Opportunity: assistance with the housing search

Bergman and coauthors randomly assigned families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County to the usual voucher process or to a program that combined information about high-opportunity neighborhoods, short-term financial assistance, customized help with the search and connections to landlords. The program raised the share of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area from 15% to 53%, and a second trial attributes most of the effect to the customized search assistance. The authors conclude that many low-income families do not strongly prefer low-mobility areas, and that barriers in the search for housing add to the segregation of families by income.[1]

The trial measures where families moved, not how their children fare as adults. Whether the moves change the children's outcomes is a question for the movers design and for later follow-up.

A forced move out of public housing

The families did not choose to move, so the comparison avoids the selection of volunteers in a voucher experiment. It describes one city's public housing in one period, and the change bundles a new neighborhood with the loss of the old building and its community.

Changes to places and institutions

Moving a family and changing a place are different interventions. Several chapters report designs that study a change to a place or to an institution, each beside the outcome it measures.

Chapter	What changed	Design
Chapter 8.1, Gun homicide and the causes of early death	Remediation of vacant lots	Cluster randomized trial
Chapter 4.2, Teen births	Access to long-acting contraception	Difference-in-differences
Chapter 2.3, Smoking in pregnancy	Cigarette taxes and state income support	Matched comparison states; difference-in-differences
Chapter 2.1, Birthweight and preterm birth	Income support and Medicaid eligibility	Difference-in-differences; simulated eligibility
Chapter 3.1, Test scores, class and race	Head Start funding and school finance reforms	Regression discontinuity; event study
Chapter 7.1, Health behaviors and the supply of care	Insurance coverage and community health centers	Randomized lottery; difference-in-differences
Chapter 8.2, Overdose, alcohol and suicide	Naloxone access laws	Staggered difference-in-differences
Chapter 5.2, Home value, income and redlining	The grading of neighborhoods on the HOLC maps	Boundary design
Chapter 6.1, Air pollution	Redlining and traffic near the home	Boundary design; difference-in-differences
Chapter 5.4, Renting, affordability and eviction	An eviction order	Random assignment of cases to judges
Chapter 3.4, School discipline and incarceration	Suspension and juvenile incarceration	Boundary change; random assignment of cases to judges
Chapter 7.4, Disability, retirement and Medicare	Medicare eligibility, disability allowance and Social Security benefits	Regression discontinuity; examiner assignment; difference-in-differences

Each study estimates what one policy or decision changed for the population it reached. None estimates how much a gradient across places would narrow if the policy were applied everywhere, and the estimates are not comparable with one another, since their outcomes, units and populations differ. The index of studies lists every study box in the book with its design, population and outcome.

What these data cannot show

The studies estimate effects for volunteers in public housing, for children whose families moved, for families issued vouchers in one metro area and for children displaced in one city, in the periods they cover. None follows the populations the earlier chapters compare. An effect of an offer is not an effect of a move, and an effect of a move is not an effect of changing the place a family left. The movers design identifies how much a child's outcome follows a place, not which feature of the place is responsible. No study here gives the share of any gradient in this book that a policy could remove, and the book reports none.

Tables

The chapter has no figures.

All estimates

Every fact in facts.json (13), sorted by id. The same values as JSON: facts.json.

Fact id	Value	Unit	Estimand	Population	Period	Interval	Weights	Source	Note
ch_exposure_yr	0.04	percentiles of adult income rank per year of childhood exposure, per percentile of difference in permanent residents' outcomes	exposure effect reported by Chetty and Hendren (2018, Quarterly Journal of Economics 133(3)): federal tax records, children born 1980 to 1988, baseline sample of one-time movers between commuting zones; movers design that compares children who moved at different ages, with sibling comparisons (family fixed effects) and moves caused by displacement shocks; the benchmark is the adult income rank of children of permanent residents of the destination at the same parent income; copied from the paper and not computed in this build	children in the study's baseline sample whose families moved once between commuting zones	children born 1980 to 1988, moves from 1997 to 2010		none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
cmto_control	15%	percent of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area	Bergman, Chetty, DeLuca, Hendren, Katz and Palmer (2024), American Economic Review 114(5): randomized trial among families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County; the treatment combined information, short-term financial assistance and customized search assistance; share of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area, copied from the abstract and not computed in this build (control group)	families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County, control group of the Creating Moves to Opportunity trial	moves after random assignment, as reported in the paper		none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
cmto_treat	53%	percent of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area	Bergman, Chetty, DeLuca, Hendren, Katz and Palmer (2024), American Economic Review 114(5): randomized trial among families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County; the treatment combined information, short-term financial assistance and customized search assistance; share of families who moved to a high-upward-mobility area, copied from the abstract and not computed in this build (treatment group)	families with children issued housing vouchers in Seattle and King County, treatment group of the Creating Moves to Opportunity trial	moves after random assignment, as reported in the paper		none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
mto_age_cut	13	years of age	the age below which Chetty, Hendren and Katz (2016) find the gain in income (definition from the study)	children in the Moving to Opportunity experiment	age when the family moved		none (definition)	Published estimates from cited studies
mto_bmi_cut	40	kilograms per square meter (body-mass index)	the body-mass index at or above which Ludwig and coauthors (2011) count a woman as extremely obese (definition from the study)	women in the Moving to Opportunity experiment	health measured in 2008 to 2010		none (definition)	Published estimates from cited studies
mto_diab_diff	4.3	percentage points lower prevalence of glycated hemoglobin of 6.5% or more in the low-poverty voucher group than in the control group	Ludwig and coauthors (2011), New England Journal of Medicine: 4,498 women with children living in public housing in high-poverty census tracts, randomly assigned in 1994 to 1998 to a voucher usable only in a low-poverty tract, an unrestricted voucher or no voucher; health measured in 2008 to 2010 (intention to treat); reported absolute difference in the prevalence of a glycated hemoglobin level of 6.5% or more, copied from the abstract and not computed in this build	women in the Moving to Opportunity experiment	health measured in 2008 to 2010	95% CI 0.8 to 7.8	none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
mto_hba1c_cut	6.5%	percent glycated hemoglobin	the glycated hemoglobin level at or above which Ludwig and coauthors (2011) count a woman as having diabetes (definition from the study)	women in the Moving to Opportunity experiment	health measured in 2008 to 2010		none (definition)	Published estimates from cited studies
mto_income_itt	14%	percent higher annual income in the mid-twenties than the control group (intention to treat, $1,624)	Chetty, Hendren and Katz (2016), American Economic Review (NBER working paper 21156): children below age 13 at random assignment, individual earnings in the mid-twenties, control mean $11,270; intention-to-treat effect of assignment to the experimental voucher group, $1,624, a 14 percent increase; read in the text of the working paper and not computed in this build	children below age 13 at random assignment to the experimental voucher group of the Moving to Opportunity experiment	income in the mid-twenties		none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
mto_income_tot	31%	percent higher annual income in the mid-twenties among families that took up the voucher (treatment on the treated, $3,477)	Chetty, Hendren and Katz (2016), American Economic Review (NBER working paper 21156): children below age 13 at random assignment, individual earnings in the mid-twenties, control mean $11,270; treatment-on-the-treated effect for families that took up the experimental voucher, the intention-to-treat effect scaled by the take-up rate, $3,477, a 31 percent increase; read in the text of the working paper and not computed in this build	children below age 13 whose families took up the experimental voucher in the Moving to Opportunity experiment	income in the mid-twenties		none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
mto_obese_diff	3.4	percentage points lower prevalence of a body-mass index of 40 or more in the low-poverty voucher group than in the control group	Ludwig and coauthors (2011), New England Journal of Medicine: 4,498 women with children living in public housing in high-poverty census tracts, randomly assigned in 1994 to 1998 to a voucher usable only in a low-poverty tract, an unrestricted voucher or no voucher; health measured in 2008 to 2010 (intention to treat); reported absolute difference in the prevalence of a body-mass index of 40 or more, copied from the abstract and not computed in this build	women in the Moving to Opportunity experiment	health measured in 2008 to 2010	95% CI 0.4 to 6.4	none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
mto_swb	0.098	standard deviations of a three-point happiness question	intention-to-treat effect of the offer to move to a less disadvantaged area on a standardized answer to 'how would you say things are these days: very happy, pretty happy, not too happy' in the Moving to Opportunity experiment (Ludwig and coauthors 2012); the estimate and standard error (0.039) are copied from the paper and the interval is the estimate plus or minus 1.96 standard errors	low-income adults in public housing in five cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York) who were offered a housing voucher to move to a lower-poverty neighborhood or an unrestricted voucher, or stayed, by random assignment	long-term follow-up survey, 10 to 15 years after random assignment	95% CI 0.022 to 0.174	as in the paper	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate for the study's adult sample, not a result of this build.
mto_takeup	48%	percent of families assigned the experimental voucher who took it up	Chetty, Hendren and Katz (2016): take-up rate of the experimental voucher; read in the text of the working paper (NBER w21156) and not computed in this build	families in the experimental voucher group of the Moving to Opportunity experiment	take-up of the voucher		none (reported estimate)	Published estimates from cited studies	A published estimate, not a result of this build.
oa_causal_share	60%	percent of the variation in adult outcomes across neighborhoods	share of the variation across neighborhoods that experimental and quasi-experimental estimates attribute to causal effects of neighborhoods; reported in the abstract of Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Jones and Porter (2018), copied from it and not computed in this build	census tracts of the United States, children born 1978 to 1983	children born 1978 to 1983, household income measured in 2014 to 2015		none (reported estimate)	Opportunity Atlas	A published estimate, not a result of this build.

Definitions

The chapter marks no glossary term.

Methods

This chapter computes nothing. It reports studies whose designs assign an offer by lottery or compare children who moved at different ages, and every estimate describes the study's population and period, not the places compared elsewhere in the book.

Where the numbers come from

The Moving to Opportunity health and income estimates are copied from Place and the length of a life, the well-being estimate from Life evaluation and daily feelings, the exposure rate of the movers design from Eight types of neighborhood, and the Opportunity Atlas share from Race, income and mobility, with their populations, periods and intervals.

The move rates of the Creating Moves to Opportunity trial are copied from the abstract of Bergman and coauthors (2024). The study of Chicago public housing demolitions is reported in words, from the abstract of Chyn (2018).

Offers, moves and scaling

An intention-to-treat estimate compares groups by the offer they were randomized to, including families who did not move. A treatment-on-the-treated estimate divides it by the share that took up the offer, which assumes the offer changed nothing for families who did not use it. The chapter names which estimate each number is.

What these data cannot show

The studies estimate effects for volunteers in public housing, for children whose families moved, for families issued vouchers in one metro area and for children displaced in one city, in the periods they cover. None follows the populations the earlier chapters compare. An effect of an offer is not an effect of a move, and an effect of a move is not an effect of changing the place a family left. The movers design identifies how much a child's outcome follows a place, not which feature of the place is responsible. No study here gives the share of any gradient in this book that a policy could remove, and the book reports none.

References

Bergman, Peter; Chetty, Raj; DeLuca, Stefanie; Hendren, Nathaniel; Katz, Lawrence F.; Palmer, Christopher (2024). Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice. American Economic Review 114(5): 1281-1337. doi:10.1257/aer.20200407
Ludwig, Jens; Sanbonmatsu, Lisa; Gennetian, Lisa; Adam, Emma; Duncan, Greg J.; Katz, Lawrence F.; Kessler, Ronald C.; Kling, Jeffrey R.; Lindau, Stacy Tessler; Whitaker, Robert C.; McDade, Thomas W. (2011). Neighborhoods, Obesity, and Diabetes: A Randomized Social Experiment. New England Journal of Medicine 365(16): 1509-1519. doi:10.1056/NEJMsa1103216
Ludwig, Jens; Duncan, Greg J.; Gennetian, Lisa A.; Katz, Lawrence F.; Kessler, Ronald C.; Kling, Jeffrey R.; Sanbonmatsu, Lisa (2012). Neighborhood effects on the long-term well-being of low-income adults. Science 337(6101): 1505-1510. doi:10.1126/science.1224648
Chetty, Raj; Hendren, Nathaniel; Katz, Lawrence F. (2016). The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. American Economic Review 106(4): 855-902. doi:10.1257/aer.20150572
Chetty, Raj; Hendren, Nathaniel (2018). The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133(3): 1107-1162. doi:10.1093/qje/qjy007
Chetty, Raj; Hendren, Nathaniel (2018). The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133(3): 1163-1228. doi:10.1093/qje/qjy006
Chetty, Raj; Friedman, John N.; Hendren, Nathaniel; Jones, Maggie R.; Porter, Sonya R. (2018). The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility. NBER Working Paper 25147. doi:10.3386/w25147
Chyn, Eric (2018). Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effects of Public Housing Demolition on Children. American Economic Review 108(10): 3028-3056. doi:10.1257/aer.20161352

Provenance

Pipeline version: 0.1.0
Build script: book2/chapters/what-moving-can-change/build.py (sha256 34775c7caa18b1b1aabda540dae962103933b123ad488162b8123f05b7370254)
Built on: 2026-10-28
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Machine formats

Report (Markdown): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/what-moving-can-change/report.md
Every estimate (JSON): https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/report/what-moving-can-change/facts.json
Index of every report: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/llms.txt; all reports in one file: https://vishalsingh.org/zipcode/llms-full.txt