When households receive Section 8 vouchers or rent certificates and moderate amounts of counseling, and have no program requirements dictating where they should move, how far will they go and how successful will the moves be? This article offers some answers to these questions by analyzing the experiences of households relocated from four distressed, privately owned subsidized developments in Baltimore; Newport News, VA; Kansas City, MO; and San Francisco.Although many of the residents chose to remain in the same area, most of them improved their situation by moving. However, the majority continued to live in racially segregated areas. The moderate relocation counseling that residents received had little impact on their housing search and on satisfaction with their new home. It may be unreasonable to expect households that are given certificates or vouchers to relocate to new or unfamiliar neighborhoods without support or without intensive counseling encouraging them to do so.

Existing research suggests that tenant-based subsidies (housing vouchers) can help to deconcentrate poverty and improve the quality of life of low-income families. The Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration program have been shown to help families move to safer neighborhoods and ones with better public schools. The regular Section 8 program has been successful in facilitating moves to low-poverty areas in places like Alameda County, California, but public housing families have had difficulties in Chicago. Research on mixed-income communities has provided little evidence that social mixing has any direct positive impacts through social interaction and/or social networks. However, the lack of research on the long-term impacts on children, such as future improvements in their employment circumstances due to better educational attainment, makes it impossible to offer conclusive assessments on the connection between income mixing and social mobility.