User:Ironholds/Moving

Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) was a randomized social experiment sponsored by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the 1990s among 4,600 low-income families with children living in high-poverty public housing projects.

Background
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States was in a perceived crime wave centred around gang violence and drug dealing in overwhelmingly poor areas. The drugs and revenues from those drugs, combined with social isolation, the disintegration of family units and a high poverty rate led to the homicide rate for young African American men increasing 1,000%. This was accompanied by a series of journalistic works, particularly those by Alex Kotlowitz and Nicholas Lemann, which described the idea of a vast, trapped underclass within American society, barely contained by the community as a whole - an idea that became more commonly held following the 1992 Los Angeles riots.