Housing Choice Voucher Client Gains Economic Stability through DHA Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) Program

At DHA, we love watching people thrive.

Previous DHA Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) client, Ro’chel, recently spoke with Ken Burns of the The Century Lives podcast, produced by the Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL).

The podcast explored Ro’chel’s tangible story as she worked to relocate to a neighborhood with lower poverty levels and a higher median income.

Ro’chel, who is also a DHA Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program graduate, shared excerpts recapping her impactful journey toward homeownership in Plano, Texas as of December 2022.

This specific podcast feature includes insights from Doug Rice, a special policy advisor from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as data-driven analysis from HUD’s Mark Shroder, who details the background on one of the largest social science experiments in modern American history, the 1994 “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO) study.

The MTO study, a major housing mobility experiment sponsored by HUD, was created to answer the question: “If poor families move into safer and more stable neighborhoods, would the parents make more money, and would children perform better in school?”

In short, the study did not find the results it first sought to discover.

Instead, the study found that mobility to neighborhoods with lower poverty levels and higher incomes meant increased physical and mental health for these families. Expert Margery Turner, a fellow at the Urban Institute noted: “People who moved seemed to be healthier…Anxiety and depression were abating.”

Safer, stable neighborhoods meant decreased fear and increased mental health, especially for mothers and their young daughters.

Elissa Epel, a professor and vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, states: “At the heart of stress, is ‘survival’ stress…When we are living in the matrix of unsafety in certain neighborhoods, that system doesn’t go back to baseline. Rather, baseline changes to an elevated level of stress, even during sleep.”

Chronic stress is tied directly to health complications, meaning that when families relocated to safer, less distressed neighborhoods, their health improved.

Neighborhoods impact health.

In 2016, a study conducted by Raj Chetty, a professor of public economics at Harvard University analyzed datasets of children that participated in the MTO study in 1994.

While analyzing the data, Doug Rice states, “The rates at which these kids attended college were 30 percent higher. They were about 30 percent less likely to become single parents as young adults. They also had higher incomes.”

Ro’chel and her children are now experiencing the relief associated with a safer, more stable neighborhood. Through DHA and the FSS program, Ro’chel gained economic independence and self-sufficiency for her family as she moved to a high-opportunity area neighborhood, where her family discovered a healthier environment, significantly boosting their sense of safety and decreasing their stress levels.

Learn more about why place matters in this podcast episode: https://bit.ly/moving-to-opportunity