Heinz School Team to Study Impact of Housing Relocation
A research team lead by Heinz School’s Jacqueline Cohen has received a three year, $1M award by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to evaluate the impact of housing relocation initiatives in Pittsburgh, PA on community levels of youth violence.
Principal investigator for the study is Jacqueline Cohen, Research Professor at the Heinz School. Co-investigators from the Heinz School include Wilpen Gorr, Professor of Pubic Policy and Information Systems, and Michael Johnson, Associate Professor of Management Science and Urban Affairs. The research team also includes co-investigators from the Center for Injury Research and Control (CIRCL) at the University of Pittsburgh, the Center for Violence and Injury Control (CVIC) at the West Penn Allegheny Health System, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD).
Outcomes from this research will provide empirical evidence on whether the private housing market provides low-income households with access to less disadvantaged and more diverse communities, and what effects relocation of low-income households into private market housing communities has on violence levels in the destination communities. The results will have implications for assessing the efficacy of housing relocation within current housing markets for violence prevention.
Prior research finds that persons who reside in disadvantaged communities are subject to greater risks of violence, both as perpetrators and victims, and individual risk factors seem to be aggravated to produce higher levels of violence than expected from individual attributes alone. The ill effects of community disadvantage are especially pronounced in neighborhoods where disadvantage is multifaceted and distributed widely among residents - features that often characterize large public housing communities that provide subsidized housing for low-income households. Partly in an effort to ameliorate the effects of concentrated disadvantage, large-scale initiatives undertaken during the 1990s relocated households from older, high-density public housing communities to communities in the private housing market.
The analysis will document similarities and differences between origin and destination communities. Recent historical patterns in neighborhood violence levels will be modeled to provide a basis for developing expected violence levels absent the housing relocation initiative. These will be compared with observed outcomes to search for discontinuities in trends associated with the timing of major housing relocations.