---
title: "Psych News Alert: Neighborhood, Social Environment Matters to Mental Health"
description: Moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term improvements in physical and mental health and subjective well-b...
image: https://alert.psychnews.org/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/shutterstock_104589932-Jun-24-2025-04-26-49-5227-PM.jpg
---

 9/21/12 12:00 AM

# Neighborhood, Social Environment Matters to Mental Health

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Moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term improvements in physical and mental health and subjective well-being finds a study appearing online yesterday in *Science*. Researchers from the University of Michigan collected data on participants in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, a randomized housing mobility experiment. From 1994 to 1998, MTO enrolled 4,604 low-income public-housing families living in high-poverty neighborhoods in five cities. Families were randomized to three groups: one received vouchers for rent in certain more affluent neighborhoods, one received rent vouchers that could be used anywhere; and a control group that received no assistance.

The researchers found that the chance to move to less-distressed neighborhoods—while having no long-term effects on economic self-sufficiency—had a large impact on physical health and a statistically significant effect on mental health. The improvement was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more. “Our results suggest that living in distressed neighborhoods has more important adverse impacts, and escaping from such neighborhoods has more important positive effects, on the well-being of low-income adults than was revealed by previous [studies] that focused on traditional measures of socioeconomic and health outcomes,” the researchers said. An abstract of the study is posted [here](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6101/1505.abstract).  For more about the link between poverty and mental illness, see *[Psychiatric Services](http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=116244)*.  

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[mental illness](https://alert.psychnews.org/tag/mental-illness), [social well-being](https://alert.psychnews.org/tag/social-well-being), [poverty](https://alert.psychnews.org/tag/poverty)

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