Low-income women with children who move from high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods experience notable long-term improvements in some aspects of their health, namely reductions in diabetes and extreme obesity, according to a new MacArthur-supported study, Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Final Evaluation. The study was the first to employ a randomized experimental design — akin to a randomized clinical trial used to test the efficacy of new drugs — to learn about the connections between neighborhood poverty and health. It was published Oct. 20 in the New England Journal of Medicine in a special article, “Neighborhoods, Obesity and Diabetes — A Randomized Social Experiment."
