About The Lecture

Low-income families often live in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities to get ahead, even when they have housing vouchers that would allow them to move to neighborhoods with more potential for upward mobility. In this SSRC lecture, Johns Hopkins sociologist Stefanie DeLuca will explore why through two randomized interventions. In these experiments, housing voucher recipients were given varying levels of information, financial support, and customized search assistance to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. The treatment increased the share of those moving to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% to 53%. Qualitative interviews with participants in the program showed that the intervention increased families’ optimism about new neighborhoods and housing, eased demands on families’ time and attention and addressed their specific needs. The combination of the two experiments and the qualitative data reveal that the customized support and search assistance provided by the program navigator staff was the necessary driver of the experimental impacts, not financial assistance or information alone. These findings imply that many low-income families do not necessarily prefer to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers to housing searches significantly increase residential segregation by income.

Speakers

Stefanie DeLuca, Professor

Johns Hopkins University

About Stefanie Deluca

Stefanie DeLuca is the James Coleman Professor of Social Policy and Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University, where she directs the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab.

Dr. DeLuca uses sociological perspectives to inform education and housing policy, and conducts mixed-methods studies that combine qualitative research with experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Some of her work focuses on the effects of programs to help low-income families relocate to safer neighborhoods and better schools through housing vouchers. Based on some of this work with young adults in the Baltimore site of the Moving to Opportunity program, Professor DeLuca wrote a book, Coming of Age in the Other America (with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title from the American Library Association, and won the William F. Goode Award from the American Sociological Association. Additional research examines how young adults make postsecondary decisions. Her work has been funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Spencer Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Abell Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, National Academy of Education, Gates Foundation and the Department of Education.

In 2021, Dr. DeLuca received the ASA Publicly Engaged Scholar award and is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. She currently serves on a NASEM consensus study on economic and social mobility in the U.S.

Dr. DeLuca earned a B.A. in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University.

About the Lecture Series

For more than 100 years, the Social Science Research Council has mobilized policy-relevant social and behavioral science aimed at finding actionable solutions to pressing societal challenges. The Council’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences is a network of nearly 50 research institutions that support our work to foster innovative and solutions-oriented social and behavioral science. In this virtual lecture series, faculty from College and University Fund member institutions share their work to understand how to pursue research that solves problems.