Unlocking Opportunity: The Remarkable Success of the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership

Existing research shows that the neighborhood where a child grows up has a causal effect on their later economic prospects. Yet in many cities, low-income nonwhite families with children often live in the lowest opportunity neighborhoods. Over the past few decades, a number of housing mobility programs using vouchers to assist families in making moves to higher-resourced communities have shown considerable success toward increasing neighborhood opportunity, garnering significant policy support. As public housing policy is increasingly influenced by Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs), we study the HMP that has generated the largest improvements in neighborhood characteristics. Participants in the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership (BRHP) reside in neighborhoods with schools performing 40 percentile points higher on state tests than poor Black residents of Baltimore City -ten times the difference between experimental and control groups in Moving to Opportunity. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions attribute the majority of the BRHP's success to its regional design, which allows participants to access all opportunity neighborhoods in metropolitan Baltimore. The BRHP breaks strong neighborhood sorting by income and race. BRHP households live in neighborhoods with socioeconomic status comparable to the highest income Black households and live in more racially-integrated neighborhoods than Black households at any income level. BRHP improvements in neighborhood characteristics are durable.