Helping low-income families move from high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods can improve children's long-run economic and health outcomes — especially for children who move when young — but effects depend on the move's design: experimental voucher offers (Moving to Opportunity) produced clear mental-health gains with limited economic effects, while quasi-experimental displacement and intensive opportunity-move programs show larger long-run earnings gains.

Kling, J. R., Liebman, J. B., & Katz, L. F (2004). Moving to opportunity and tranquility: Neighborhood effects on adult economic self-sufficiency and health from a randomized housing voucher experiment. Working paper (Princeton/NBER).

Experimental

Five years after random assignment, MTO families lived in safer, lower-poverty neighborhoods with significant mental-health benefits but no significant overall effects on employment, earnings, or public assistance.

Mercedes A. Bravo, Dominique Zephyr, Marie Lynn Miranda (2024). Residential instability, neighborhood deprivation, and outcomes for children. BMC Public Health.

Observational · N = 37,982 · children

Study finding that moving from high-deprivation to low-deprivation neighborhoods was associated with higher 4th-grade reading and math scores (with earlier moves showing greater benefits), while moving into more-deprived neighborhoods was associated with lower scores.

Bearing on this claim: [curated fold] Large observational study linking moves to lower-deprivation neighborhoods with better child test scores, larger for earlier moves.