Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper studies whether, and how, parents respond to changing neighborhood quality by adjusting parental involvement: a term of the overall level of care, discipline, and supervision directed at the child. Empirical measurement of this response is complicated by selection into neighborhoods: unobserved changes in the family environment are likely to be correlated with neighborhood quality, through the residential location decision. To deal with this issue, I utilize a natural experiment: the mass closures of public housing projects in Chicago. I study the impact of public housing closures on parental involvement in the immediate neighborhood of a closed project, as well as in neighborhoods receiving relocations from closed housing projects. Due to sample overlap issues, my results stem from the latter category of neighborhoods.  I find that parents tend to increase overall involvement when the neighborhood receives relocations from public housing, which is also correlated with decreasing neighborhood quality. In contrast, child behavior does not appear to be strongly affected, suggesting that parents could be offsetting the effect of declining neighborhood quality on their children. To determine the nature of this increase in parental involvement, I examine specific subgroups of behavior, and find that parents improve the home environment, as well as increase the level of family activities. In contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that parents adopt stricter disciplinary practices. Additionally, I find interesting variation in the size of the response across parents: parents of younger children respond more strongly, as do parents living in more affluent neighborhoods. These findings suggest that conventional estimates of neighborhood effects may need to be reinterpreted, and that different parental responses may explain how neighborhood change has different impacts on children. Finally, these results also establish the impact of public housing closure policy on an unexpected population.