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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.

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While the growing literature on HOPE VI emphasizes the presumed benefits of income mixing these benefits are most likely to occur if middle-income families with children are drawn to these sites. But is this feasible? Our comparative case study analysis of four HOPE VI sites in Cincinnati, Louisville, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, suggests that it will be difficult to achieve the mixing of lower-and middle-income families with children. None of the four developments explicitly sought middle-income families with children as part of their marketing. Louisville's HOPE VI site was the only one involving close collaboration between the school district, the housing authority, and city government from the beginning of the HOPE VI process. Moreover, the Louisville site was the only one successful in attracting middle-income (and not simply subsidized moderate-income) families with children. Strategies for making inner-city HOPE VI sites more attractive for middle-income families are discussed.In 1992, HOPE VI (originally known as the Urban Revitalization Demonstration Program) was enacted to transform the physical and social shape of distressed public housing. Under the current program this transformation includes: changing the physical shape of public housing by replacing the worst public housing developments with less dense developments, reducing concentrations of poverty by encouraging a

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.

Comparing USA and Dutch experiences, this paper seeks to determine whether the demolition of public or social housing results in negative spillover effects, i.e. the shift of crime and other social problems to nearby neighbourhoods, as a result of residential relocation patterns. Notwithstanding fundamental contextual differences, existing research shows that many relocatees do recluster in low-income areas not much better than the public or social housing sites they moved from. Furthermore, USA and Dutch research highlights concern among public officials, politicians and community activists that this clustering is resulting in higher crime, increased neighbourhood dissatisfaction (among existing residents), more conflicts between residents, lower school test scores, etc. Few researchers have, however, been able to go beyond correlations and establish cause-effect relations between the in-movement of public/social housing relocatees and increased social problems. Attempts to identify a statistical threshold for clustering, beyond which negative effects occur, have not been successful. Nevertheless, existing evidence regarding negative spillover effects is compelling enough to warrant expanded and improved monitoring of both relocation and neighbourhood change patterns and to initiate programmes to address the concerns of residents in destination areas.Spillover effects, restructuring, demolition, relocation, displacement, HOPE VI, vouchers, United States, Netherlands,