LOW-INCOME FAMILIES' PERCEPTION OF HOME & OPPORTUNITY

 Nicole Kiker

 Political Science, International Studies

 Class of 2021

When I first read how the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) program functioned, it made perfect sense to me. CMTO used a combination of support mechanisms to help Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) holders move to designated higher-opportunity neighborhoods. These supports include financial assistance with security deposits and moving costs, support in connections to landlords, and assistance in creating materials to better communication around issues such as evictions and credit problems. Opportunity Areas, or OAs, are census tracts that produce historical rates of upward income mobility, particularly for children who grow up in low-income families. Years of research have shown that moving to better neighborhoods earlier in childhood improves children’s outcomes in adulthood significantly. By using this designation, the CMTO team could calculate the expected return on investment in the program through anticipated upward income mobility of children from families that moved. This measure also seemed to automatically include many of the secondary impacts on a child’s economic outcomes, like school quality and extracurricular activities. A designation based on future income was a straightforward and effective measure of real opportunity offered by a neighborhood, and contrary to some academic expectations, research has proven that voucher-holding families tend to end up in lower-opportunity areas because of barriers to their moving to opportunity, rather than due to a preference for lower-opportunity areas.

However, when I started writing narratives of respondents’ experiences with CMTO and the HCV program, synthesized from interview and survey data, human experiences debunked the apparent straightforwardness of solely economic measures of neighborhood opportunity. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I quickly found that opportunity was more complicated than could be captured by upward income mobility.

Kohsan[1] lived in Kent, a non-Opportunity Area, when he received his voucher. He decided to keep his immigrant family in this area, mostly because they had a strong network of other immigrant families there. His wife does not speak much English, but she has found a strong peer group of women, and the respondent is starting a business in his neighborhood with some friends. When the respondent’s wife gave birth during the pandemic, she and her husband did not need to cook or clean for over a week due to the tireless support of their network. While CMTO offered more money to move to an Opportunity Area, for this respondent it was not worth it to leave his family’s social network.

Another family of Muslim immigrants chose to move to Bellevue, an Opportunity Area. While they are very happy with their children’s schools, they keep to themselves in their majority-white apartment building and neighborhood, concerned about harassment on the basis of their religion, immigration status, and race. This concern is based primarily on their general understandings of the functioning of majority-white and wealthy neighborhoods in the United States. They are wary of giving neighbors a reason to harass or complain about them, and thus do not feel comfortable engaging much with their neighbors. In Egypt, as the respondent said, it was common to greet strangers on the street. However, in their new neighborhood in Seattle, “when you wear a hijab and you’re black, sometimes people are scared of you, so now we don’t talk too much with neighbors.” Instead, they have friends in Kent, the same neighborhood in which Koshan’s family chose to stay. For the family that did move, the opportunities for their children’s futures were worth it, but came with the need, real or perceived, for constant vigilance against xenophobic and racist harassment.

Cicely received her voucher and immediately knew that she wanted to raise her children in the Central District of Seattle, where she herself grew up. However, the Central District is not an Opportunity Area. Still, the respondent had fond memories of living in this area, and was attracted to its museums, performing arts centers, parks, community centers, and amenities like grocery stores, in addition to the high quality of its schools. While these all tend to be characteristics of Opportunity Areas, this neighborhood had not been designated as such based on upward income mobility of children who grew up there. This respondent struggled to find an apartment that would fit her family within the price range set out by the voucher, and wondered why the Public Housing Authority would not give her the extra bit of money to afford a place in the neighborhood she wanted, but would give her more than 5 times as much to move to an Opportunity Area.

Is it not an opportunity to be grounded in the support of a strong immigrant community? Is the ability to let your guard against racism and xenophobia down in your own home not an opportunity in itself? How does neighborhood opportunity relate to self-determination when some voucher holders must choose between the two?

None of this is to say that the designation of neighborhood opportunity based on upward income mobility is wrong, but rather to suggest that there is simply more to opportunity than income (or future income gains). Voucher holders need to be able not only to move to opportunity neighborhoods, but to feel at home in these areas. Voucher holders deserve the opportunity not just to earn more, but to embrace their identities, form bonds, and honor their personal histories; in other words, they deserve to truly feel at home. These respondents have shown me that the opportunity can change based on who you are, even if you live in the same neighborhood. Interventions like CMTO ensure that voucher holders’ mobility is unconstrained by barriers, such as the difficulty of navigating the public housing system, past trauma (such as evictions, domestic violence, and homelessness), and current financial constraints. But in order to ease the constraints of racism, xenophobia, and limited options for mobility for the least privileged among us, neighborhoods themselves need to change. This change will enable families to move to real, holistic opportunity, no matter who they are.

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