Creating Moves to Opportunity: Visions for the future

BY JANE SCINTA

Seattle and King County’s Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) program is meant to address specific challenges in the housing search process. Where voucher holders struggled with application fees and security deposits, landlord negotiation, and unit searches, CMTO provided financial assistance, landlord engagement, and search assistance. For some CMTO participants, the navigators made a world of difference. For voucher holders who’d had tumultuous housing histories, negative experiences interacting with federal programs, and challenges dealing with discriminatory or unsympathetic landlords in the past, the emotional support and reassuring guidance of housing navigators were essential. For others, however, further assistance was still necessary. The challenge of seeking housing in a market with sky high rents, in combination with the time pressure imposed on voucher holders and the psychological costs of repeated letdowns and frustrating interactions with landlords and housing authority staff, sometimes prevented success in the housing search. Previous housing challenges, like having an eviction on one’s record or having been repeatedly disappointed by efforts to move into more affluent neighborhoods, were highly discouraging during housing searches with CMTO. 

One of my first tasks at PIRL was to gain further context into the obstacles to securing stable housing through the Measuring Housing Insecurity Project. Here, we read through baseline interview transcripts, delineating participant’s housing trajectories and classifying residential moves into specific types - in essence, labeling the reasons for each family’s moves. While familiarizing myself with various logistical and procedural elements of the project, I also had to reckon with all the feelings associated with sorting through a stranger’s (often turbulent) residential history. I felt like a trespasser reading respondents’ deeply personal stories anonymously. In addition to the emotional discomfort of my first weeks reading interviews, I faced the procedural challenge of sorting moves into clear definitional categories. Many of the narratives were rich with context and built out the fuller picture of respondents’ housing decisions. The task of labeling immensely complex, socially situated residential decisions into simple categories was therefore overwhelming at times. The challenge of housing insecurity coding, then, was not just that of finding my way around a new task, but also of applying short and resounding labels to strangers’ emotionally fraught strategies for finding a stable home. 

Reading CMTO interviews makes it clear that voucher provision alone cannot address the host of challenges associated with searching for and acquiring housing. Voucher holders face challenges like finding a unit at the right price level for their voucher, managing transportation and childcare throughout the search, convincing discriminatory landlords to rent to them, meeting credit and income requirements for renting, juggling other obligations in the midst of an intense time crunch, and managing the emotional toll of repeated disappointments and tough decisions, among many others. The solution posited by CMTO is the housing navigator: someone to provide search assistance, financial help, knowledge about the leasing process, and emotional reassurance throughout the process. 

It wasn’t until I went to Seattle firsthand to conduct follow-up interviews with respondents that the burdens of the housing search became personal. Reading CMTO interviews from behind a computer screen is one thing. Sitting in respondents’ homes as they point out the challenges their unit poses, outline the obstacles they faced in moving in, and assert their determination to move is vastly different. I was humbled by the complete selflessness of many respondents. The talking points I’d heard before about voucher holders dodging work or abusing government assistance were completely discredited by my interactions with CMTO respondents. A shocking portion, unprompted, spoke of getting off their housing voucher as soon as they could so another family could use it. Parents told stories about sleeping on the streets so their kids could have a place to stay for the night, working more jobs than was economically advantageous just to feel purposeful, and making time to take their kids to parks and activities in spite of the immense weight on their shoulders as they navigated housing searches. 

What made the biggest impact on me was the recognition that, although families selected different types of neighborhoods, each family optimized their residential choice in the context of their particular circumstances. It was easy to question the choices families made to remain in place, select a non-Opportunity Area over an OA, prioritize school quality over unit quality, or emphasize unit features at the expense of neighborhood amenities. But in addition to the challenges of searching with a voucher, each family had their own preferences and constraints that cast doubt on an outsider’s uniform assertion that everyone should move to an Opportunity Area. To help CMTO families, the program needed to meet them where they were at and understand the fuller picture of their wants and needs. And it should never pre-suppose some superhuman amount of time, focus, and information to navigate the labyrinthine systems of searching for housing using government assistance. 

By far the best part of interviews was hearing respondents’ hopes and dreams for the future. It’s no accident that we ask respondents to share these hopes and dreams at the end of the interview; it’s the perfect way to conclude the emotionally intense and incredibly personal in-depth account that is the CMTO interview. After inviting us to her daughters’ high school graduation, Shanita painted a picture for us of the food truck she plans to open, explaining each menu item (including the “tropical delight” cake pop - a personal favorite of mine) she has been working on. Everyone’s dreams were varied, but common to all was seeking the brightest possible future for their kids and feeling some kind of ownership, like over a project, a skill set, or a small business. I thought back to the way Dr. DeLuca (PI) framed the study: that our goal was to enable human potential. This goal informed our interviews’ focus on understanding the unique situations and aspirations of each voucher recipient family and perceiving CMTO’s past and potential role in actualizing their dreams. Enabling human potential also underlies the set-up of CMTO: it is the compassion and personalization of services that acknowledge and meet families’ exact circumstances that make federal housing assistance the most powerful it can be. 

On one of the last days of fieldwork, we heard an especially powerful CMTO narrative about visions for the future. Our respondent Jennifer explained that CMTO was the family and support system she needed in the midst of significant hardships in the housing search. Her experience with CMTO was everything one could hope for the program to achieve. Relocation to her Opportunity Area neighborhood helped Jennifer make new connections, receive support and friendship from neighbors, and learn new strategies for navigating the neighborhood and services in her life. The feeling of safety and stability in her new neighborhood reframed Jennifer’s perspective on her life and her decisions for her children’s education, helping her feel greater trust towards people in her community and to imagine different possibilities for her life. Standing on the roof of her building, Jennifer described feeling like she was on top of the world. As Jennifer put it, her new unit wasn’t just her dream home; it also let her imagine bigger dreams for the future. It was clear from Jennifer’s story that the compassion of the housing navigators made this incredible experience of empowerment possible. 

Yet even CMTO has room for improvement. Examining the findings of our Seattle follow-up interviews, we realized that the proposed approach of growing human and social capital by empowering families to move to higher opportunity neighborhoods fell short where it failed to take into account the fuller picture of a family’s needs. Each family faced a different obstacle which required an individualized approach by housing navigators. Where families had poor credit, finding an amenable landlord in an opportunity area seemed more daunting. Where families had past experiences of racial discrimination in their neighborhood, they questioned whether certain opportunity areas might be for them. Where parents were dependent on local networks for emotional or logistical support, the costs of moving to an OA were much higher.  

The stories we heard through our interviews were so compellingly human. They spoke to the universal desire to realize one’s dreams and aspirations. Many of the conversations were uncomfortable or deeply personal or emotionally difficult. Yet the disheartening and upsetting stories of past experiences weren’t what dominated the interview; instead, it was the tenacity and resilience of CMTO families that took center stage. With CMTO voucher holders doing so much in the face of all the challenges presented in the housing search, I wanted policy to work just as hard for them. 

Reading CMTO interviews, you realize that, particularly for low-income families, the housing search is not about a logical cost-benefit analysis with perfect information–actually, it’s anything but that. Where public services embrace this reality is where they, and the families they serve, will find the most success. Centering voucher holders’ dreams and challenges when formulating assisted mobility programs is the ultimate way to uplift receiving families. No family’s housing search looks the same and neither should the assistance they receive.