Neighborhoods and Youth

Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and an expert on public housing, has been named the director of the Institute’s new Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development.

The Moving to Opportunity program targeted families living in some of the nation's poorest, highest-crime neighborhoods and offered them a chance to move to lower poverty areas. One hope was that, away from concentrated poverty and the risks associated with it–including poor physical and mental health, risky sexual behavior and delinquency–families would fare better. This brief examines how adolescent girls benefited from moving out of high poverty and discusses why girls might have fared so much better than boys.

This report presents findings from the first detailed study of Baltimore's 5 year high school reform. Using administrative data, Urban Institute researchers found that test scores and attendance rates were higher for students in Baltimore's innovation high schools than in the city's comprehensive or newly formed neighborhood high schools. Students in innovation and neighborhood schools also showed more stability in their enrollment than their counterparts in comprehensive schools. These findings remained after controlling for students' backgrounds and previous achievements even though students at innovation schools were more academically advantaged than their peers in other schools prior to entering high school.

A 2007 proposal to reauthorize HUD’s HOPE VI public housing revitalization program requires local housing agencies to establish partnerships with school superintendents. The purpose is to devise comprehensive educational reform and achievement strategies for improving schools serving HOPE VI neighborhoods. Five situations where HOPE VI revitalization and school improvement have already occurred, however, suggest wide variation; each was context-sensitive and tended to be an opportunistic experiment cut from different cloth. Absent a uniform model, there is a need to know more about what incentives, which local stakeholders, and what kinds of partnerships produce improved educational outcomes before establishing uniform requirements.

A substantial body of social science research finds evidence that living in high-poverty and racially isolated neighborhoods can undermine the well-being and life-chances of both children and adults. Clearly, neighborhood environment is not the sole factor influencing people's well-being; individual and family attributes also play critical roles. This paper uses the latest data from the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) to explore variations across types of neighborhood environments in the well-being of families and children. Its takes advantage of the richness of NSAF's data on family work effort, economic security, access to services and supports, and child well-being, in order to shed new light on the relevance of neighborhood environment.