December 12th, 2017
Despite recent reductions in neighborhood crime and poverty, children and adults in many unsafe neighborhoods are traumatized by witnessing or living in constant in fear of violence.After reviewing the evidence on neighborhood violence and mental health, we focus on the promise of residential mobility intervention programs to reduce neighborhood-violence-related mental health problems. Most of our attention is devoted to the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility program, which randomly assigned families living in public housing in high poverty urban neighborhoods opportunities to move to low-poverty neighborhoods.An evaluation of adult and child outcomes four to seven years after baseline revealed substantial program-based improvements in adults’ perceptions of neighborhood safety and victimization and in adults’ mental health. Impacts on the violence experienced by children were much smaller than for adults and also smaller for boys than girls. Mental health improvements were also confined to girls. Evidence suggests that boys’ problem behaviors may actually have worsened as the result of their families’ receiving the MTO program offer to move to low-poverty neighborhoods.