Talk:Moving to Opportunity

The author of the article has attempted to do a good job, but has gotten a number of things wrong. Starting with the first sentence, "Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) is a program sponsored by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which gives Section 8 housing vouchers to low-income families and gives them counseling and assistance to help them move to low-poverty neighborhoods with better resources than the usual high-poverty neighborhoods that Section 8 voucher holders usually move to."

What is wrong here is the tense. MTO was an experiment, and the experiment is no longer enrolling families. Therefore "MTO *was* a *demonstration* program ... that *gave* Section 8 vouchers" etc.

The author has also missed one of the key points of the experiment. The families were not just "low-income families," they were *very* low-income families with children living in high-poverty public housing projects in large US cities. They were much more disadvantaged than the average low-income family.

In the third sentence, one reads, "Two of the groups received standard counseling while the third group received special assistance with searching for homes in low-poverty areas." This is wrong. One of the groups did not receive any vouchers, and therefore received no counseling at all.

In the second paragraph, one reads, "so nearly all participants in both high-poverty and low-poverty were employed." This is wrong. What the author should have said is that although there was a huge increase in employment in the experimental groups, there was a nearly identical increase in employment among the control group who did not receive any vouchers.

I am the author of the "HUD description" cited in the references, and will be glad to discuss further with the author, the editor, or anybody else. Mark Shroder
 * Please be bold and edit the page yourself. It's likely nobody else will see this for a long time. Funnyfarmofdoom (talk to me) 02:23, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
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