Case Study: Are Poor Neighborhoods

A study called the “Moving to Opportunity Program”, looks at the long-term effects of children’s education progress in high-poverty neighbourhoods. A randomized mobility experiment in which a subset of low-income minority families living in public housing in high-poverty neighborhoods were given vouchers to move to low-poverty neighbourhoods were used to evaluate 1 policy approach for improving children's educational outcomes. Four hundred twenty-five New York City children were seen 2 1/2 and 5 years following relocation (mean age=14.64 years, SD=3.21 years). Analyzes examining program effects on 5-year educational outcomes, accounting for 2 1/2-year outcomes, revealed that “program effects on adolescent boys' achievement found at 2 1/2
A case study from Princeton University called, “Are Poor Neighborhoods Resource Deprived? A Case Study of Childcare Centers in New York” tests whether poor neighborhoods are affected if they lack a critical institutional resource such as child care centers. Researchers Laura Stark and Mario Small used geocoded data for 1996-2002 to see if all licensed centers in New York City matched institutional address matched to census tracts. The authors estimate logit models of the presence of center in track, testing for the linear and nonlinear effects of tract poverty level after controlling for residential instability, joblessness, ethnic makeup, and other demographic factors . The authors used different methods to analyze their data such as reviewing documentaries, conducting interviews, and comparing ethnographic data on centers in the poor and non-poor neighborhood in the city. The findings suggest
Many researchers and policymakers suggest that poor single mothers are better off in middle-class neighborhoods than in poor ones. Part of the expected benefit is the greater presence of institutions often missing from ‘‘resource-deprived’’ neighborhoods. Throughout this study, we read about numerous situations of children who live in New York, expanding in population but does not have vital infrastructure or services. Family income appears to be more strongly related to children's ability and achievement than to their emotional outcomes. These children are endangered because they become invisible to the authorities and they become lost in statistical averages that conceal