Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    Why Living in a Poor Neighborhood Can Make You Fat

    by Andrew Curry Dec 17, 2015 8 minutes

    It was the most ambitious social experiment ever conducted by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. And one of the most surprising.

    In 1994, HUD randomly assigned 4,600 poor, mostly African-American families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to one of three groups. One group received housing vouchers intended to help them move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Another group received vouchers without geographic restrictions. A final control group didn’t receive vouchers at all.

    Called “Moving to Opportunity,” the study was designed to answer a question that had divided social scientists and policymakers for decades: Did getting people off of welfare and other forms of social assistance depend on changing their social context?

    TOWN WITHOUT PITY: A rundown, abandoned house in Detroit symbolizes the kind of poor American neighborhood that fuels destructive levels of stress.Peter Baker

    More than a decade later, the researchers found that a lot of things hadn’t changed. Many people offered housing vouchers didn’t move. The people who did move to better neighborhoods didn’t change their diets or daily lifestyles. Their kids showed no improvement in reading or math scores. And moving didn’t make people any more or less economically self-sufficient, the question the study was designed to answer.

    But as the experiment went on, researchers began encountering anecdotal evidence that surprised them. The people who

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus10 min read
    The Ocean Apocalypse Is Upon Us, Maybe
    From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaoti
    Nautilus7 min read
    Lithium, the Elemental Rebel
    Inside every rechargeable battery—in electric cars and phones and robot vacuums—lurks a cosmic mystery. The lithium that we use to power much of our lives these days is so common as to seem almost prosaic. But this element turns out to be a wild card
    Nautilus13 min read
    The Shark Whisperer
    In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places

    Related Books & Audiobooks