Seattle's housing navigators tripled moves to opportunity neighborhoods

Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) paired Seattle-area Section 8 voucher recipients with 'housing navigators' to help them lease in neighborhoods where children grow up to earn more — blocks researchers led by Raj Chetty had shown vary sharply in outcomes. The 2023 follow-up experiment split families into arms: the control group moved to high-opportunity areas at 12.5%; information plus short-term financial help added 8.9 points (not statistically significant); limited navigator support reached 26.3%; full navigation reached 53.3%.

The navigators came in two flavors, both contracted through the local nonprofit Interim Community Development Association: family navigators who effectively took over the housing search — 'they pretty much took care of the rest... they applied for me, and they helped with the first month's rent and the renter's insurance for a year,' recalled participant Nikkie Manlapaz — and housing navigators who met landlords in high-opportunity neighborhoods and dispelled negative impressions of Section 8 tenants.

The full treatment cost $3,060 per family, against $1,001 for the medium arm and $705 for the light one — a 17.2% add-on to the voucher's total cost over its seven-year average life, including higher rents. Standard economics predicted information alone should have sufficed; Chetty's answer: 'If you give people information, and even cash, that doesn't do it.' An earlier HUD experiment had found children whose families moved to low-poverty areas earned 31% more in their mid-20s.

Don't just inform — assign navigators who search, apply and vouch with landlords: customer service, not information, is what moves families.

Information plus cash left moves to opportunity neighborhoods statistically flat; only hands-on navigation moved the number.

Navigators absorbed the frictions — searches, applications, landlord suspicion — that made high-opportunity leases fall through.

The service mirrors what wealthy renters buy from brokers, which is why it worked where leaflets failed.

Government programs fail at the last mile of customer service; a concierge costs about $3,060 a family and roughly triples the outcome of a leaflet.

The researchers argued the model applies across government services, where eligible people routinely fail to enroll: one in five people eligible for food stamps doesn't get them, and in states like California and North Carolina the share is 30%.