With some counseling and guidance, though, families who receive vouchers can have much better outcomes, DeLuca said, especially if they're directed to homes in high-opportunity target areas.

She has now turned her attention to the ongoing Baltimore Mobility Program, which has provided vouchers for 2,600 families since 2003, and says it's an example of how a mobility program can succeed.

“This voucher gets them into the kinds of neighborhoods that have real opportunities for schools, and safety, and high-quality housing,” she said. “There appears to be a durability of this program that’s strikingly different from MTO, much more like Gautreaux.”

The Baltimore program requires residents to live in areas that are less than 10 percent poor, less than 30 percent black, where no more than 5 percent of residents live in subsidized housing. Baltimore provides housing-search counseling to participants, as well as post-move counseling, and requires residents to remain in the area for at least two years. Families also get some assistance with security deposits, attend credit-repair workshops, and go on tours of outlying counties to familiarize themselves with the options.

In her field work, which examined 110 households in depth, DeLuca found that living in a different neighborhood helped the Baltimore families make better choices when it came to housing and their children’s schooling. Families had higher expectations for the neighborhoods where they lived and showed “new appreciation” for racial and ethnic diversity and good schools, often becoming willing to make difficult trade-offs for the sake of their families. Parents said it was a new world: One woman told researchers that she now goes to work, comes home, pays the bills and has fun with her children, whereas she used to go drinking with friends. Another said her kids appreciated not being woken in the middle of the night by sirens and gunshots. Another mother said her 12-year-old son now cried because he was so happy to go to school in the morning and do his homework:

Everything was great—the school—everything was great when we moved here. The move was just like a breakthrough for everybody; a change for everybody.

For DeLuca, the successes of the Baltimore program indicates that it’s not enough to just expect people with vouchers for housing or schools to pick the right places to live or to send their children. They aren’t used to having good options to pick from, she said.

“Disadvantaged families have only been exposed to low-performing schools and unsafe neighborhoods, and have to come to expect the inevitability of those things,” she said. “Experiences like the ones families had with Gautreaux and the Baltimore program—it’s eye-opening. It opens up a whole world of possibilities, and it’s hard to understate the transformative power of that.”

It’s something that Seitia Harris knows all too well. When she moved to Alsip, she says, her family was at first unaccustomed to peace and quiet. There were no more people hanging out on the street corner or shots at night. Parenting plays a role in a child’s development, she said, of course. But before she moved, she was a good parent in a bad environment, where there was too much exposure to drugs, negativity, and gangs.