Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered over 4,000 public housing residents in five U.S. cities the opportunity to move to very low poverty neighborhoods. Results from a survey conducted four to seven years after random assignment showed that boys in the experimental group fared no better or worse on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, while girls in the experimental group demonstrated better mental health and lower risk behavior relative to control group girls. We seek to understand these differences by analyzing data from the survey and from in-depth interviews conducted with a random subsample of 86 teens 14 to 19 years old in Baltimore and Chicago. We find that control group boys, especially in Baltimore, deployed conscious strategies for avoiding neighborhood trouble, in contrast to many experimental boys who had subsequently moved back to higher poverty neighborhoods. Second, experimental group girls' patterns of activity fit in more easily in low poverty neighborhoods than boys', whose routines tended to draw negative reactions from community members and agents of social control. Third, experimental boys were far less likely to have strong connections to non-biological father figures than controls, which may have contributed to behavioral and mental health problems.