Do Neighbourhoods Influence Long-term Labour Market Success? A Comparison of Adults Who Grew up in Different Public Housing Projects

This paper examines whether long-run labour market outcomes depend on residential environment among adults who grew up in subsidized housing in Toronto. The housing program in Toronto provides a full spectrum of neighbourhood quality types to measure outcome differences, and offers a real-life example of large scale neighbourhood quality reform. A primary advantage with this approach is that, conditional on participation in public housing, residential choice is substantially limited. Families that applied for public housing could not specify which project they wished to be housed in and were constrained to what was offered based on availability at the time they applied and by family size. Unlike previous housing mobility experiments, the availability of administrative tax records are used to measure both short and long run outcomes. The results indicate almost no difference in educational attainment, adult earnings, income, and social assistance participation between children from different public housing types. Average outcomes, estimated wage distributions, and outcome correlations among unrelated project neighbours show no significant neighbourhood impact. In contrast, family differences seem to matter a great deal.