NEW MTO STUDY FINDS YOUNG CHILDREN'S HEALTH BENEFITS FROM HOUSING VOUCHER PROGRAM 

In a just-released analysis, a team at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found evidence of moderately reduced hospital costs for children whose families had received housing vouchers in the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program (MTO), with additional cost savings associated with moves to lower poverty neighborhoods. Read a summary of the research here and the abstract here. The MTO Program was begun in 1994 by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with the objective of determining the benefits of offering housing and neighborhood mobility opportunities to low-income families.

The analysis was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on December 3, 2019. It was written by Alexandra Yurkovic, Michael Silverstein, and Alastair Bell.

This research builds on prior research on the health benefits of housing mobility, and work by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council's own estimates of long term health system cost savings.