Publications on Mobility & Transportation

MTO offered families living in concentrated poverty the chance to move to lower poverty areas, away from the high unemployment and high crime rates areas with the challenges and risks they present. This brief looks at whether the program was successful in helping families move away from those neighborhoods and stay away from them, noting both the reasons for subsequent moves and the characteristics of the neighborhoods to which they made those moves.

Panelists discussed the needs of the frail elderly and homeless populations, the missing pieces in housing options, design solutions that can improve accommodations, and ways to better a delivery system that is highly fragmented across jurisdictions and target populations.

This paper analyzes special problems faced in disasters by institutions that have custodial responsibility for human beings. Hospitals in New Orleans did not evacuate in advance of Katrina, but the flooding that followed the hurricane made it essential that many hospitals be evacuated. Based on interviews and public sources of information, we describe hospitals' experiences in the days that followed the hurricane and lessons for hospitals in circumstances in which evacuation may arise. Many types of patients present distinct challenges in evacuation circumstances. Planning by individual hospitals is essential but inadequate in circumstances in which multiple facilities are affected.

New Orleans's hospitals cared for many of the city's most vulnerable people before Hurricane Katrina struck, but they also faced some of the most difficult challenges once flooding made evacuation necessary. A new report explores what happened in the area's hospitals, especially the 11 flood-bound institutions in the most desperate circumstances, and why they had varied experiences. The authors also present lessons resulting from the events surrounding Katrina.

During the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched three rigorous research demonstrations testing alternative strategies for helping low-income families escape the isolation and distress of high-poverty, central-city communities. All three demonstrations were carefully designed to include rigorous controls and systematic data collection so that their implementation and impacts could be systematically evaluated. And all three are now generating provocative results that offer new insights for ongoing program experimentation and policy development. We draw ten broad lessons--including lessons about the potential for success, about the realities families face, about implementing complex strategies, and about obstacles to success. [View the corresponding report]