Researchers found that voucher recipients lived in lower-crime neighborhoods and generally had better units than the control group families, but the experiment had no impact on educational attainment.
p. 149 The drop could be an effect of disruptions of social networks resulting in increased difficulty in finding work and arrange informal and affordable child care.
[8] In 2010, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin and John Goering published "Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty".
Their ethnographic work, conducted with financial support from HUD, adds an in-depth qualitative dimension to the experiment's findings by relating the stories of the families involved.
[10] A critique in the Du Bois Review (2004) by Arline Geronimus and J. Phillip Thompson calls the Moving to Opportunity study "politically naive".
[11] Their study theorizes that moving a family into a higher income neighborhood might solve immediate, direct health risks (for example clean water, less crime) however the loss of social integration, stress factors, and racially influenced disparities, would likely mitigate any short term improvements.