Urban Form and MTO Outcomes in Chicago

Urban Affairs Association Annual Meeting

March 4-7, 2009

Capturing Space and Place: Urban Form and MTO Outcomes in Chicago
Emily Talen (Arizona State University), Julia Koschinsky (Arizona State University)

This paper aims to advance the understanding and measurement of
space and place in research on the geography of poverty and
opportunity. We analyze resident outcomes from the federal Moving to
Opportunity (MTO) experiment in relation to an overlooked aspect in
existing MTO research: The role of urban form, i.e. the spatial and
built environment characteristics of neighborhoods. The research
question is whether an improvement in resident outcomes in Chicago is
associated with characteristics such as accessibility of amenities,
services and facilities, density, land use mix, street design or
pedestrian orientation. The hypothesis to be tested is that these
factors contribute to the explanation of why some outcomes of movers to
low-poverty neighborhoods improved less than expected and why some
residents moved back to higher-poverty neighborhoods. Data from HUD's
Restricted Access Tier 1 Dataset will be correlated with planning data
for the city of Chicago. Beyond the case of Chicago, this paper seeks
to advance the conceptualization and measurement of space and place in
regards to "poverty neighborhoods" and "opportunity neighborhoods"
beyond socio-demographic characteristics.