A randomized trial of poverty reduction in the US and residential mobility to lower-crime neighborhoods

Low-income families disproportionately experience higher neighborhood crime. When choosing where to live, families report neighborhood safety as a top priority. Yet, the role (if any) that income plays in promoting moves to safer neighborhoods remains unclear. In our paper, we leverage a social experiment of a randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers to understand whether the effect of increased net income led mothers to move to safer neighborhoods. We utilize the Baby's First Years randomized trial of ∼1000 families to test whether unconditional cash transfers promote residential mobility among low-income families to safer neighborhoods characterized by lower violent and/or property crime. We also test for heterogeneity by the number of children in the household. Our intent-to-treat results show no difference in families' neighborhood crime rates, by cash transfer group, over the four-year test period for any crime outcome. However, among mothers with at least two children at enrollment, the high-cash gift group moved to neighborhoods with lower crime rates compared to the low-cash gift group. Receipt of a modest, monthly, unconditional cash transfer corresponds with subsequent moves to a safer neighborhood for a subset of low-income families with newborns.