Rooms for Improvement: A Qualitative Metasynthesis of the Housing Choice Voucher Program

This article synthesizes housing subsidy voucher research to explain why, when in theory vouchers enable users to move out of poor neighborhoods, in practice they often do not. This qualitative meta-analysis presents an examination of the assumptions of the program and their relationship to empirical findings.

Two themes emerged from this synthesis: market barriers and product problems. Data from a variety of studies and contexts portray recipients struggling to use vouchers in the private rental market due to market barriers, including lack of public transportation and the presence of discrimination. Product problems constrained freedom of choice about where to move and when to make a housing transition. These constraints manifest as compromised housing quality and low voucher utilization. This synthetic view cannot account for all outcomes or exceptional cases, but results suggest where participant experiences are generalizable and attributable to features of the housing market and structure of the program itself.     

A different lens: administrative perspectives on portability in Illinois' Housing Choice Voucher Program

Over the last decade, the Housing Choice Voucher Program has grown to become the USA's primary strategy for providing safe, decent, and affordable housing. Annually serving more than 2 million low-income households, the program is designed to help low-income households afford private market rental housing. The program also allows for the “portability” of vouchers nationally between housing authority jurisdictions. Both features aim to mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty. Research on the Moving to Opportunity Program and the Gautreaux consent decree have produced data confirming that residential mobility can at times lead to positive opportunities for assisted households. This past research has been conducted on specific programs occurring outside of the general Housing Choice Voucher Program framework and has focused on household-level outcomes, paying little attention to the ways in which program administration may affect outcomes for voucher households. This article aims to understand voucher portability from the perspective of housing authority executive directors and program administrators, in order to better understand how program administration impacts the types of household outcomes observed in prior research. The results reveal that housing authority administrative practices and inter-housing authority relationships play a significant role in shaping the types of outcomes realized by porting voucher households. These findings suggest several changes to program administrative design and policy that may improve support for voucher households as they make portability moves.     

Searching for Affordability and Opportunity: A Framework for the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Abstract

Affordability, a key factor in the housing search process, becomes critical when locating rental housing in opportunity-rich areas. The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program accommodates low-income households searching for housing and encourages recipients to reside in low-poverty areas. Affordable neighborhoods that are accessible to public transportation are often found in distressed areas, and not all HCV recipients succeed in locating qualified housing. To address these challenges, a housing search framework is developed to assist HCV households in the housing search process. This framework builds on the methodology of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the Location Affordability Index and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing assessment tool by creating multivariate indices that incorporate housing supply, accessibility to opportunity, and neighborhood conditions. The framework serves as a foundation for an online housing search application for public housing authorities to further fair housing goals, HCV recipients to locate qualified housing units, and local governments to assess affordability and opportunity.     

Taking Stock: What Drives Landlord Participation in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

ABSTRACT

To succeed, the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program must be attractive to rental property owners. When landlords refuse to accept subsidized renters, lease-up rates decline, administrative costs increase, and options become limited to high-poverty neighborhoods where owners are most desperate. This article examines what motivates landlords’ decisions to accept subsidized tenants. We use 127 interviews with a random and field sample of landlords, combined with administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on property ownership in Baltimore, Maryland, Dallas, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio. We find that landlords’ perspectives on the HCV program, including rents, tenants, and inspections, are highly dependent on context; landlords weigh the costs and benefits of program participation against the counterfactual tenant that a landlord might otherwise rent to in the open market. We argue that policymakers can boost landlord participation by better understanding how landlords think about their alternatives within each local context. Finally, we consider what drives nonparticipation in the program. Our results show that the majority of landlords who refuse voucher holders had accepted them previously. We suggest that policy reform should be dually focused on improving bureaucratic inefficiencies that deter landlord participation, and providing training and education to landlords.     

Housing Choice Voucher Location Patterns a Decade Later

In 2003, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) prepared a study of the location patterns of the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. This study became an important baseline for the evaluation of the HCV program and its ability to serve the goal of poverty deconcentration. The study examined the ability of HCV households in the 50 largest metropolitan areas to make entry to a broad array of neighborhoods and to locate in high-opportunity neighborhoods with low levels of poverty.

New data from HUD and the American Community Survey permit the study to be replicated. We find that vouchers continue to consume only a small portion of the housing stock, with relatively small amounts of spatial concentration. Unfortunately, only about one in five voucher households locate in low-poverty neighborhoods, and this share is rising only very slowly. If the nation wants to pursue poverty deconcentration through the HCV program, we cannot rely on the program, as it is now structured, to accomplish this goal. Additional incentives and constraints will be needed, similar to those that were part of the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity programs.     

Rental Housing Assistance and Health: Evidence From the Survey of Income and Program Participation

Interest in the health impacts of renter housing assistance has grown in the wake of heated national discussions on health care and social welfare spending. Assistance may improve renters’ health by offering (a) low, fixed housing costs; (b) protection against eviction; and (c) access to better homes and neighborhoods. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and econometric analysis, I estimate the effect of receiving assistance from the public housing or Section 8 voucher programs on low-income renters’ reported health status and spending. Assisted renters spent less on health care over the year than unassisted low-income renters did, after controlling for other characteristics. This finding suggests that assisted housing leads to health benefits that may reduce low-income renters’ need to purchase health services. Voucher holders’ lower expenditures are influenced by their low, fixed housing costs, but public housing residents’ lower expenditures are not explained by existing theory.     

Rethinking Locational Outcomes for Housing Choice Vouchers: A Case Study in Duval County,Florida

This study examines locational patterns of housing choice vouchers in Duval County, Florida, using the Housing Suitability Model (HSM), a newly developed geographic information system–based model that evaluates residential land parcels and neighborhoods in terms of their suitability for affordable housing. The HSM was used to characterize voucher locations and other residential parcels across the county in terms of opportunity and accessibility. The analysis explores the tradeoffs between opportunity and accessibility inherent in many neighborhoods throughout the county. It finds that voucher holders' locations lag substantially behind other residential locations in terms of opportunity measures but are more comparable in terms of accessibility. Further analysis finds differences in opportunity and accessibility among subgroups of voucher holders by various demographic characteristics. The study recommends the incorporation of opportunity and accessibility for voucher holders into local housing planning, including the implementation of proposed rules for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.     

The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing

The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) Program is designed to address a $26 billion public housing capital needs backlog. New investment is leveraged by converting public housing to project-based assistance, with ownership transferred to nonprofit and private entities. In other words, RAD is expediting the end of the country’s 80-year-old public housing program. While this may seem like a dramatic policy shift, there is actually little about RAD that is new. This investigation of RAD’s origins reveals it to be the coalescence of existing programs, established policies, and longstanding trends multiple decades in the making. This in turn helps explain why RAD has expanded so quickly and why its expansion is likely to continue. There exists a great need for more research on and monitoring of RAD’s implementation, and for a reassessment of the policy priorities that produced both the program itself and the problem it attempts to solve.     

Mortgage Choice in Rural Housing

Rural homeownership is promoted in the United States by mortgage insurance programs administered by the federal government. We analyze the choice between assistance offered by two such agencies: the Federal Housing Administration and the Rural Housing Service (RHS). We find applicants are sensitive to the relative annual mortgage insurance premiums and guarantee fees. However, there are also persistent racial differences as well as institutional effects. We also find the application and origination process is substantially longer in the RHS program, but variation in closing times does not clearly impact mortgage choice.     

Do Small Area Fair Market Rents Reduce Racial Disparities in the Voucher Program?

ABSTRACT

A lawsuit that argued that the method used to calculate rent limits in the Housing Choice Voucher Program promoted racial segregation in Dallas, Texas, resulted in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development developing zip code-based voucher rent limits in Dallas in 2011. This rent calculation approach was then expanded to five other demonstration sites in 2012. This article analyzes whether adjusting voucher rent limits reduces a minority household’s likelihood of living in a high-minority neighborhood, improves their likelihood of living in a higher opportunity neighborhood, and reduces the disparity in location outcomes between minority and White households in the voucher program. This article finds evidence of improvements in the location outcomes of Black and Hispanic voucher households because of the use of zip code-based rent limits, but that these results are only marginal with respect to the persistent disparities in outcomes based on race within the voucher program.     

Future Prospects for Public Housing in the United States: Lessons From the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program

This article provides an overview of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program in the United States and examines its early implementation from its start in 2013 through April 6, 2016. RAD was devised to address the physical deterioration of public housing and secure a more stable funding stream. It requires public housing authorities to shift properties out of the public housing program into a different subsidy program (project-based Section 8) which enables them to obtain mortgages on more favorable terms and to secure tax-credit investment. The program is currently limited to 185,000 housing units. As of April 6th, the program was fully subscribed, and had generated more than $2 billion in new investment. Extrapolating from the early results, RAD has the potential to yield more than $15 billion for fund the redevelopment and renovation of public housing.     

One Strike to Second Chances: Using Criminal Backgrounds in Admission Decisions for Assisted Housing

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has changed its position toward housing individuals with criminal records from strict one-strike policies in the 1980s to providing second chances to returning citizens. Many public housing authorities have not updated their admission policies for using criminal backgrounds and still adhere to the one-strike philosophy. In response to new guidance from HUD, housing agencies are trying to find a balance between screening practices to identify demonstrable risk but avoid discrimination and violation of the Fair Housing Act. This research examines several questions critical to assisting housing providers to address the new guidance from HUD. Findings provide direction for housing providers on understanding recidivism risk rates, using useful lookback periods, considering risk and harm across crime types, and verifying rehabilitation and other evidence to design informed policies and procedures for using criminal records in admission decisions for assisted housing.     

Household Energy Consumption and Housing Choice in the U.S. Residential Sector

Energy use in residential buildings accounted for 21% of U.S. CO₂ emissions in 2013. Efforts to reduce energy use in the residential sector have been overly focused on improving energy efficiency of buildings. This article incorporates housing policy debate into energy policy, hoping to provide new opportunities for planners to participate in residential energy policy. Using data from the latest Residential Energy Consumption Survey, structural equation modeling has been applied to isolate the direct and indirect effects of household and housing characteristics on residential energy use. Results show that more than 80% of a household's indirect effect on energy consumption happens through the building characteristics, which is characterized as the housing choice effect on energy consumption. Planners can participate in residential energy management efforts by influencing housing needs and priorities of communities towards more sustainable compact housing units.     

Housing Choice Vouchers and Crime in Charlotte,NC

Recent media attention and research have focused on the effect of housing vouchers on crime, with different conclusions. The purpose of this study is to bring further evidence to the voucher–crime debate, using annual data from 2000 to 2009 for Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. We study the relationship between crime counts and housing vouchers with quantile regression models with year and census tract fixed effects. We found that voucher households are associated with increased crime, controlling for past crime levels. Estimates vary, however, with the concentration of vouchers in the neighborhood, with little impact in areas with low concentrations. Estimates also vary with the neighborhood crime level. We extend the literature by examining the effect of different voucher family types, finding no evidence that elderly households or nonelderly households without disabilities and without children are associated with more crime. However, we found a very significant positive association for nonelderly households without disabilities with children. Our results indicate that significant crime reductions could be accomplished by focusing U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, local housing agency, and criminal justice resources on the types of places and voucher families most at risk for crime problems when a family uses a voucher to move into a new neighborhood.     

School Quality,Residential Choice,and the U.S. Housing Bubble

Using data from the American Housing Survey (years 2001–2009), we find that purchase prices for homes selected primarily to access self-identified “good schools” rose (relative to homes selected for other reasons) during the key U.S. housing bubble period, compared with the periods before and after the bubble. We observe a similar pattern in homebuyers' mortgage-to-income ratios. Various regression specifications and propensity score matching techniques show that these trends persist conditional on a range of household, demographic, and economic controls. Our results suggest that the strong, bubble-era pursuit of good schools may have played a role in the housing bubble's expansion.     

Housing Voucher Take‐Up and Labor Market Impacts

Low participation rates in government assistance programs are a major policy concern in the United States. This paper studies take‐up of Section 8 housing vouchers, a program in which take‐up rates are quite low among interested and eligible households. We link 18,109 households in Chicago that were offered vouchers through a lottery to administrative data and study how baseline employment, earnings, public assistance, arrests, residential location, and children's academic performance predict take‐up. Our analysis finds mixed evidence of whether the most disadvantaged or distressed households face the largest barriers to program participation. We also study the causal impact of peer behavior on take‐up by exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the timing of voucher offers. We find that the probability of lease‐up increases with the number of neighbors who recently received voucher offers. Finally, we explore the policy implications of increasing housing voucher take‐up by applying reweighting methods to existing causal impact estimates of voucher receipt. This analysis suggests that greater utilization of vouchers may lead to larger reductions in labor market activity. Differences in take‐up rates across settings may be important to consider when assessing the external validity of studies identifying the effects of public assistance programs.     

High Costs and Segregation in Subsidized Housing Policy

This article examines the public policies determining the distribution of subsidized housing in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota, the resulting distribution of subsidized housing, and the comparative costs associated with building in the region's central cities or in suburbs. The analysis concludes that current policies are clearly not meeting the region's responsibility to affirmatively further fair housing. The metropolitan area abandoned its role as a national leader in this area decades ago. The result is an affordable housing system that concentrates subsidized housing in the region's poorest and most segregated neighborhoods. This increases the concentration of poverty in the two central cities, in the region's most racially diverse neighborhoods, and in the attendance areas of predominantly nonwhite schools. In the long run, this hurts the regional economy and exacerbates the racial gaps in income, employment, and student performance that plague the Twin Cities.     

Institutionalized social skill and the rise of mediating organizations in urban governance: the case of the Cleveland Housing Network

In this paper we build on an expanding literature that attempts to understand the changing organizational and institutional dimensions of contemporary urban governance. We do so by utilizing the Cleveland Housing Network as a lens through which salient characteristics of contemporary governance become visible. Doing so enables us to highlight the distinctive challenges of the multi-institutional nature of contemporary governance arrangements and “heterarchic” governance in particular. These challenges situate mediating organizations as central components of governance arrangements. Finally, by focusing on the distinctive characteristics of the organization's leaders, we demonstrate that mediating organizations are usefully thought of as institutionalized forms of the “social skill” of institutional entrepreneurs.     

Health and Health Services Access Among Adults With Disabilities Who Receive Federal Housing Assistance

Using newly available U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative data linked with National Health Interview Survey data, this study estimates the prevalence of disability among HUD-assisted adults and examines health disparities for this population. The linked data suggest a much higher prevalence of disability among HUD-assisted adults than previously suggested by HUD administrative data. Controlling for individual characteristics and HUD program type, assisted-housing residents who have disabilities experienced higher rates of self-reported fair or poor health, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and cigarette smoking. Adults with disabilities had more frequent use of emergency rooms and increased concerns with affording the necessary health care. HUD-assisted adult residents with disabilities were more likely than residents without disabilities to be connected to the health-care system, having higher rates of insurance coverage and more frequent contact with specialists, general doctors, and mental health-care providers. Policy implications are discussed.     

The Characteristics and Unmet Housing Program Needs of Disabled HUD-Assisted Households

The mismatch between the housing needs of persons with a disability and the housing programs designed to accommodate those needs is an important housing policy concern. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sponsors several programs designed to improve the housing conditions of persons with a disability, but we know little about the characteristics of persons with a disability, among those receiving federal housing assistance, or the degree to which persons with a disability are served by HUD-sponsored housing programs that are designed to meet the needs of persons with a disability. Our study relies on administrative data from HUD and the U.S. Census Bureau to address this research gap. We find that many persons with a disability are served by HUD-sponsored programs that are not designated for persons with a disability, even when disability accommodations have been requested, and a similarly large share of persons with a disability live in potentially eligible low-income households that do not receive HUD assistance.