More recently, however, the tide of evidence has begun to turn in favor of Wilson’s “neighborhood effects” hypothesis. These disappointing conclusions were generally sustained when the evaluation was repeated ten to fifteen years after random assignment ( Sanbonmatsu et al. 2011) but that the intervention offered “no convincing evidence of effects on educational performance employment and earnings or household income, food security, and self-sufficiency” ( Orr et al. Statistical comparisons of the two groups five to seven years after random assignment revealed that members of the experimental group did experience lower levels of neighborhood poverty and improved mental and physical health ( Ludwig et al. Members of the former group were offered housing vouchers that required subjects to move into a low-poverty neighborhood and the latter received no offer of vouchers but continued to receive project-based assistance. The MTO study randomly assigned poor residents of public housing projects in five metropolitan areas to experimental and control groups. Although analyses of multilevel survey data and nonexperimental results derived from static group comparisons generally produced results consistent with Wilson’s hypothesis (see Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000 Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002 Massey and Clampet-Lundquist 2008), experimental findings from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Study were initially less supportive ( Kling, Lieberman, and Katz 2007). Since that time, a large body of research has sought to establish the existence of “neighborhood effects” on individual social, economic, and health outcomes. In his seminal book, The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson (1987) notes the growing concentration of poverty within black inner city neighborhoods and hypothesized that long-term exposure to spatially concentrated disadvantage was central to the perpetuation of poverty among African Americans.

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