Today on Capitol Hill, Opportunity Insights and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) are holding a Congressional briefing on their groundbreaking Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) research. The briefing for members of Congress and state will feature Opportunity Insights and NAS’s impactful research on the impact neighborhoods can have on upward mobility and children’s life outcomes.
Opportunity Insights’ Dr. Raj Chetty and his partners’ research indicates that where a child grows up has a significant impact on his or her earning potential. In August 2019, Opportunity Insights released encouraging findings from their study of the Seattle Housing Authority and King County Housing Authority’s CMTO program, an innovative pilot that enables low-income families to move to high-opportunity areas in order to access better education, health, and economic opportunities for their children. Researchers found that the CMTO program increased the share of low-income families who rented in high-opportunity neighborhoods by 40 percent, results that Chetty says are promising: “Through CMTO, we found that a small intervention can dramatically change a family’s ability to provide their children with the upward mobility promised in the American Dream.”
The impactful research findings have been widely-publicized in major media outlets including The New York Times, NPR, Vox, and City Lab.