你以为搬离贫民区就能脱贫吗

Twenty years ago, federal poverty experts, inspired by the forceful arguments in the landmark book “The Truly Disadvantaged,” as well as by definitive research on the harmful effects of segregation, initiated a government experiment that moved 855 low-income predominantly African-American and Hispanic families out of public housing in poverty-stricken urban areas into less impoverished neighborhoods.
20年前，标志性书籍《真正的穷人》(The Truly Disadvantaged)中强有力的论述，以及关于社群隔离的负面效应的权威研究，使得联邦贫困问题专家深受启发，于是他们启动了一项政府实验项目，让855户低收入家庭从贫困城区的公租屋中搬到经济状况更好的社区。这些家庭绝大多数为非洲裔和西语裔。

The results of the project have provoked an intense debate.
项目的结果引发了激烈争论。

Under the aegis of the “Moving to Opportunity” program, begun during the first administration of Bill Clinton, the Department of Housing and Urban Development randomly selected a large pool of low-income families with children living in public housing in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Ninety-eight percent of the families were headed by women; 63 percent were black, 32 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent white; 26 percent were employed, 76 percent were receiving welfare, and families had an average income of $12,709 in 2009 dollars.
该计划名为“搬向机遇”（Moving to Opportunity，简称MTO），始于比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)的第一个总统任期。当时，联邦住房与城市发展部从巴尔的摩、波士顿、芝加哥、洛杉矶和纽约随机选择了一大批有小孩的低收入家庭。其中98%的家庭由女性支撑；63%为黑人、32%为西语裔、3%为白人；26%有工作、76%领救济，以2009年价格折算的家庭平均收入为1万2709美元（当时约合8.7万元人民币）。

These families, 4604 of them, to be exact, were then divided into three groups. An experimental group of 1,819 families was offered “Section 8 rental assistance certificates or vouchers that they could use only in census tracts with 1990 poverty rates below 10 percent”; 855 accepted the offer and became part of the study. A second group of 1,346 families was offered more traditional “Section 8” rent subsidy vouchers that could be used in any neighborhood; 848 accepted.
参与项目的共有4604户家庭，分为三组。一个实验组有1819户，政府向他们提供了“《住房法案》第8节规定的租赁补助券或代金券，但只能在1990年贫困率低于10%的人口普查区内使用”；855户接受了提议，参与到这项研究中。第二组有1346户，政府向他们提供的是更为传统的租赁劵，可以用在任何社区；848户对此予以接受。

A control group composed of 1,439 families stayed in public housing and became part of the study. The purpose of the relocation initiative, according to Department of Housing and Urban Development, was to test the “long-term effects of access to low-poverty neighborhoods on the housing, employment and educational achievements of the assisted households.” Researchers also studied how relocation affected the health of those who accepted vouchers.
此外还有1439户家庭留在公租屋社区里，成为研究中的对照组。联邦住房与城市发展部表示，这一搬迁项目的目的在于，测试“受助家庭进入低贫困社区后在住房、就业和教育成就方面的长期效应。”研究人员还研究了搬迁对领取租赁劵人员的健康影响。

A paper published in the May 2013 issue of the American Economic Review, “Long-Term Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence From Moving to Opportunity,” found that after 10 to 15 years, moving out of high-poverty public housing through the M.T.O. program showed mixed results.
《美国经济评论》(American Economic Review)2013年5月刊发表了一篇题为《低收入家庭的长期社区效应：以“搬向机遇”项目为例》(Long-Term Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence From Moving to Opportunity)的论文。文中发现，相关家庭通过MTO项目迁出高贫困公租屋社区的10到15年后，结果好坏参半。

There were some positive developments, according to the primary author of the paper, Jens Ludwig, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and the project director for a final assessment of the M.T.O. program. Ludwig and his six co-authors found improvement in “several key adult mental and physical health outcomes.” These included significantly lowered risk of diabetes and obesity, as well as an improved level of “subjective well-being.”
论文的第一作者芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)经济学教授延斯·路德维格(Jens Ludwig)是负责MTO最终评审的项目主管。他表示，的确存在一些积极进展。他和六名论文合著者发现，受试者在“几项关键的成人心理与生理健康指标”上有所进步，比如糖尿病与肥胖症的风险显著降低，以及“幸福感”有所提升。

But the Ludwig study also found that “changing neighborhoods alone may not be sufficient to improve labor market or schooling outcomes for very disadvantaged families.” Ludwig reported that this particular form of assistance from HUD –a housing voucher that allowed recipients to move into a “low poverty” area – had “no consistent detectable impacts on adult economic self-sufficiency or children’s educational achievement outcomes, even for children who were too young to have enrolled in school at baseline.”
不过，路德维格的研究还发现，“光是变动居住社区，或许并不足以改善底层家庭的就业或学业成就。”他在文中指出，这种允许家庭搬迁到“低贫困”地区的特殊租赁券“在一些方面没有可观察到的持续效应，不管是经济上的自给自足，还是孩子的教育成就，就连实验伊始年龄尚小、没有入学的孩子也如此。”

Ludwig reported similar findings in a follow-up essay published this week by Third Way, a Democratic think tank.
在民主党“三维智库”(Third Way)本周发表的一篇后续文章中，路德维格提出了类似结论。

Some of the nation’s most prominent poverty researchers, including William Julius Wilson, a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” consider that the design of the M.T.O. project was flawed, leading to unwarranted conclusions about the lack of improvement in employment and schooling.
美国的一些最为权威的贫困问题研究者，比如哈佛社会学教授、《真正的穷人》的作者威廉·朱利叶斯·威尔逊(William Julius Wilson)认为，MTO项目存在设计缺陷，从而引来了就业与学业方面未能有所改善的不妥结论。

Wilson pointed out in an email to The Times that the families in the study who left public housing moved into segregated neighborhoods nonetheless, far from employment opportunities and with equally bad schools – often the same schools. Social conditions were only marginally better than those they had left.
在写给《纽约时报》的电子邮件中，威尔逊指出，MTO项目里离开公租屋的家庭还是搬到了隔离社区，远离就业机会，而学校的糟糕程度也不相上下，子女往往还是去同样的地方上学。他们的社会状况只比之前好上一星半点。

In addition, Wilson wrote, the adults in the program “had been exposed all their lives to the effects of severely concentrated disadvantage, and no matter how long they are followed in their new neighborhoods, the effects of those earlier years are not fully erased.”
此外，威尔逊写道，参与项目的成年人“此前一生均过着极为底层的生活，无论到新社区里住了多久，早年所受的影响也不能完全消除。”

Robert Sampson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argued in a 2008 essay published in the American Journal of Sociology that the project should have been called “Moving to Inequality.”
在《美国社会学期刊》(American Journal of Sociology)2008年发表的一篇论文中，哈佛社会学教授罗伯特·桑普森(Robert Sampson)提出，MTO项目还不如叫做“搬向不平等”。

Sampson pointed out in an email that many of the adults in the program had lived in extreme poverty for decades and that the children, who were on average 11 years old when they entered the program, had spent their early years living in adversity. “The result,” he wrote, “is that developmental effects are difficult if not impossible to study in the research design,” which does not reveal the “lagged effects of severe disadvantage.”
桑普森在写给时报的电子邮件中指出，参与MTO项目的许多成年人本已在极端贫困中浸淫了几十年，而他们的子女在项目开始的时候平均年龄为11岁，也已经历了早年的逆境。“结果，”他写道。“在这样的实验设计之下，很难、甚至是不可能研究发展效应，”因为这种设计没有揭示出“严重贫困的滞后效应”。

While the M.T.O. participants moved to neighborhoods with somewhat less poverty and crime, their new homes were by no means in flourishing sections of the city. Sampson produced a map of Chicago showing that the overwhelming majority of families moved to areas that still qualified as communities of “high concentrated disadvantage” based on a measure combining poverty rates, unemployment, welfare receipt, female-headed households, racial composition and density of children.
虽然参与MTO项目的家庭搬到贫困与犯罪状况稍好的社区，其新家所处的地段绝不是什么欣欣向荣之所。桑普森绘制了一幅芝加哥地图，其中显示，根据贫困率、失业状况、领取救济状况、女性支撑家庭的数量、种族构成和儿童人口密度进行衡量的综合指标，绝大多数MTO家庭迁去的地方仍是“底层人口高度集中”的社区。

In a separate study, Heather Schwartz, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, reached conclusions more in line with Sampson’s and Wilson’s. Schwartz examined the performance of low-income, mostly minority students in Montgomery County, Md., an affluent majority-white suburb of Washington.
在另一项研究中，来自兰德公司(RAND Corporation)的研究员希瑟·施瓦茨(Heather Schwartz)得出的结论也与桑普森和威尔逊更为一致。在马里兰州蒙哥马利县，施瓦茨研究了大多为少数族裔的低收入家庭学生的表现。该县属于华盛顿的郊区，经济富裕，以白人居民为主。