Moving to Wealthier Neighborhoods Does Not Decrease Emergency Department Use

In the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development deployed the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program to test the effects of neighborhood poverty on low-income residents. In five large cities, families were randomized to receive a traditional Section 8 housing voucher, to receive a voucher that required that they lease a home in a neighborhood with a household poverty rate <10%, or to a control group. These authors compared rates of emergency department (ED) use in the three groups.

The MTO program included 3145 adults and 7256 children at the time of enrollment. Families were followed for an average of 12 years after randomization (more than 36,000 total person-years of data). Overall, the rate of ED visits was 0.53 per person per …