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.     

How Vehicle Access Enables Low-Income Households to Live in Better Neighborhoods

ABSTRACT

Transportation influences residential location choices generally, but low-income households often face unique constraints because of a lack of access to automobiles. This article examines how vehicle access influences the type of neighborhoods in which low-income households are able to secure housing following a move to a new neighborhood. We rely on data from the Moving to Opportunity program to estimate locational attainment models, including a wide range of variables capturing various dimensions of neighborhood opportunity. Our findings suggest that auto access enables low-income households to secure housing in neighborhoods that exhibit a wide range of positive neighborhood attributes, including lower poverty rates, lower housing vacancy rates, higher median household income, higher labor-force participation, and higher adult high school graduation rates.     

Why Do Housing Mobility Programs Fail in Moving Households to Better Neighborhoods?

This article conceptualizes the relationship between housing instability, residential mobility, and neighborhood quality. We summarize the existing literature about residential mobility and housing instability and examine their potential interactions along three dimensions: (a) the reasons for a move, including a variety of push and pull factors; (b) mobility outcomes in terms of whether moves result in residing in a better or worse neighborhood than that of the prior residence; and, especially important for low-income households, (c) the degree to which the current move and past experiences of moving have been discretionary or forced. Housing instability is a cumulative concept, with involuntary moves at its center. This synthetic model of housing instability's impact on mobility outcomes suggests that the more instability a household has experienced, the less likely mobility moves are to occur, or, if they do occur, to be long lasting. Policy implementation may underestimate the interaction between cumulative housing instability and residential mobility in housing mobility policies. Thus, these interactions have implications for mobility policies, pointing toward a path for future research that inform policies to move low-income households toward both greater housing stability and better neighborhood outcomes.     

Moving to Location Affordability? Housing Choice Vouchers and Residential Relocation in the Portland,Oregon, Region

Abstract

Location affordability measures a household’s combined cost of housing and transportation. Low-income households have the most to gain from housing with lower transportation costs. This research analyzes whether Housing Choice Voucher Program households—participants in a program designed to provide low-income households with a greater degree of housing choice—are able to choose housing that lowers their transportation costs in a metropolitan region with a compact, vital urban core. A mixed-methods approach is used to investigate the differences in location affordability and efficiency among 2,026 voucher recipients who moved within the Portland, Oregon, region during 2012–2013. Location mattered to movers, but in some unexpected ways. Urban movers relocated to less location efficient areas, whereas suburban movers’ location efficiency remained stable. In tight housing markets, voucher holders may be edged out of location-efficient neighborhoods and thus incur increased transportation costs.     

Market Rental Housing Affordability and Rapid Transit Catchments: Application of a New Measure in Canada

Abstract

In high-income cities, the availability of affordable rental housing in locations served by fast and frequent public transportation enables low-income households access to more opportunities, including jobs, without the costs of owning and operating automobiles. This study operationalizes a residual income approach to identify market rental housing that is affordable to two household configurations (couples with children and couples without children) in two categories below the median income. The study is carried out on Canada’s least and most expensive major metropolitan housing markets, Montreal and Vancouver. In addition to spatially disaggregating the results into inside and outside rapid transit walking catchments, the results are spatially disaggregated into four zones (Urban Core, Inner City, Inner Suburbs, and Outer Suburbs). Implications of the uneven distribution of affordable rentals with respect to transit access are discussed.     

Development of an Index of Subsidized Housing Availability and its Relationship to Housing Insecurity

Housing insecurity is a known threat to child health understanding predictors of housing insecurity can help inform policies to protect the health of young children in low-income households. This study sheds light on the relationship between housing insecurity and availability of housing that is affordable to low-income households.

We developed a county-level index of availability of subsidized housing needed to meet the demand of low-income households. Our results estimate that if subsidized units are made available to an additional 5% of the eligible population, the odds of overcrowding decrease by 26% and the odds of families making multiple moves decrease by 31%. Both of these are known predictors of poor child health outcomes. Thus, these results suggest that state and federal investments in expanding the stock of subsidized housing could reduce housing insecurity and thereby also improve the health and well-being of young children, including their families' food security status.     

Do Shrinking Cities Allow Redevelopment Without Displacement? An Analysis of Affordability Based on Housing and Transportation Costs for Redeveloping,Declining, and Stable Neighborhoods

Abstract

Plans and policies to combat or mitigate gentrification typically pursue affordable housing production and preservation as the primary mechanism to avoid displacement. However, it is unclear whether affordable housing financing mechanisms function as designed in weak market cities. As such, we question whether the housing-only approach is a complete one and whether increased transportation investments in redeveloping neighborhoods in shrinking cities can be leveraged to improve the lives of the poor. Our results suggest that funding for subsidized housing does not produce units affordable to the poor in declining cities, limiting the efficacy of a housing-only approach. Furthermore, we find that transportation costs make up a larger proportion of household budgets among families living in declining neighborhoods. These results suggest that transportation improvements—particularly those aimed at bicycling and pedestrian accessibility—may be the most efficient approach to mitigating displacement and improving quality of life for low-income households in shrinking cities.     

Transit-Induced Gentrification: Who Will Stay,and Who Will Go?

Abstract

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has been promoted by planners and policy advocates as a solution to a variety of urban problems, including automobile traffic congestion, air pollution, and urban poverty. Since the enhanced accessibility offered by transit proximity is often capitalized into land and housing prices, many express concern that new transit investments will result in the displacement of the low-income populations likely to benefit most from transit access, a phenomenon which we term transit-induced gentrification. Whereas policy advocates have proposed a variety of interventions designed to ensure that affordable housing for low-income households is produced and preserved in areas proximate to transit stations, little is known about the effectiveness of these policy proposals. This article relies on an integrated land use/transportation model to analyze how TOD-based affordable housing policies influence the intraurban location of low-income households. We find that affordability restrictions targeted to new dwellings constructed in TODs are effective tools for promoting housing affordability and improving low-income households’ access to transit while simultaneously reducing the extent of transit-induced gentrification.     

Child characteristics and successful use of housing vouchers: Estimates from the moving to opportunity demonstration

Abstract

Voucher‐based programs have become the most common form of housing assistance for low‐income families in the United States, yet only a slim majority of households that are offered vouchers actually move with them. This article uses data from 2,938 households in the Moving to Opportunity demonstration program to examine whether child characteristics influence the probability that a household will successfully use a housing voucher to lease‐up.

Our results suggest that while many child characteristics have little bearing on the use of housing vouchers, child health, behavioral, and educational problems, particularly the presence of multiple problems in a household, do have an influence. Households with two or more child problems are 7 percentage points less likely to move than those who have none of these problems or only one. Results suggest that such families may need additional support to benefit from housing vouchers or alternative types of affordable housing units.     

The new demographics of housing

Abstract

During the 1990s, minorities played an increasing role in population growth throughout the United States. Fueled by international migration and by high natural increase, Asians and Hispanics have joined with blacks to greatly elevate minority contributions to population and household growth at almost every geographic level. In addition to racial and ethnic turnover, households have been changing compositionally because of the aging of the population and because of the increase in the number of unmarried adults.

This article surveys these and other demographic changes and examines their implications for household growth and housing consumption. A clearer understanding of both white and minority roles in owner and renter housing trends is developed through tracking changing consumption patterns. Distinct patterns of cohort turnover have taken place in different vintage housing stock. These trends, which have led to large net gains for minorities, are expected to continue over the next decade and beyond.     

Estimation of housing needs amid population growth and change

Abstract

This article proposes a theoretical framework and more accurate methods for projecting the household growth component of estimates of housing needs. These estimates combine empirical evidence with normative assumptions about the quantity of housing expected with population growth. Recent California experience illustrates the theoretical and practical issues involved. Alternative empirical methods are used to model changes in per capita household formation and homeownership rates over time.

The results show great instability between 1960 and 2000 in the linkage between population and housing needs, casting doubt on which linkage to use for future projections. Past changes in housing growth are attributed to changing population composition and occupancy patterns for subgroups. Estimates based on a cohort method are lower than those using constant rates of housing consumption and conform much more closely to recent experience, but it may not be desirable to lock in the deficiencies of the past when projecting needs.     

Subsidized Housing and Residential Trajectories: An Application of Matched Sequence Analysis

Scholars have long debated the relative merits of site-based, subsidized housing owned and operated by a public entity or by the private sector. This is the first study to classify long-term residential trajectories of nationally representative low-income households in the United States by their initial assisted housing status. We employ a matched sequence analysis of neighborhood poverty and racial trajectories of low-income households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics who formed during 1988–1992. Among households carefully matched by their demographic and economic attributes, we find that those first forming households in public housing spend much longer durations over the subsequent 20 years in poorer, minority dominant neighborhoods than similar households first forming in market-rate housing do. In contrast, forming a household in private site-based subsidized housing is associated with superior neighborhood socioeconomic (but not desegregated racial composition) trajectories compared with starting in market-rate housing. Implications for housing policy are discussed.     

Last in line: Housing assistance for households with children

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between receipt of different types of rental housing assistance and housing outcomes for households with children. We rely on the 1989 American Housing Survey (AHS) and a special data supplement that attempted to accurately categorize every assisted renter‐occupied address in the AHS sample as either public housing; privately owned, federally assisted housing; or certificates and vouchers. Housing outcomes examined are physical condition of the unit, crowding, affordability, perceived neighborhood quality, and crime. We analyze three research questions: (1) Do the characteristics of households enrolled in housing programs differ by program type? (2) Do housing outcomes differ with the type of assistance received? (3) Do differences in household characteristics account for observed differences in program outcomes?

The analysis suggests that the housing assistance system channels different types of households with children into different housing programs. The least disadvantaged households are most likely to end up in privately owned assisted stock, while the most disadvantaged end up in public housing. The most notable interprogram difference in housing outcomes relates to neighborhood quality. In contrast to other forms of rental assistance, residence in public housing is associated with a decline in neighborhood quality. This result holds even after controlling for household characteristics and geographic location of the unit.     

The changing demography of multifamily rental housing

Abstract

The residents of multifamily rental housing are different from both homeowners and single‐family home renters, and these differences have implications for the housing market and for public policy. This article describes apartment residents today, discusses recent changes in their number and characteristics, projects their future growth and composition, and highlights business and policy implications of future changes.

For purposes of business and public policy, a segmentation of apartment residents into three submarkets is useful: the “affordable” market serving low‐ and moderate‐income households, some of which receive government housing assistance; the “lifestyle apartment market” serving higher‐income adult households; and the substantial “middle market.” The number of apartment renters is likely to grow moderately over time. The combination of multifamily structure type and rental tenure form offers unique opportunities not only for provision of affordable housing but also for revitalization of downtown areas and balanced “smart” growth in suburban areas.     

Quality of Life,Transportation Costs,and Federal Housing Assistance: Leveling the Playing Field

Abstract

Federal housing subsidies are allocated without regard to spatial differences in the cost of living or quality of life. In this article, we calculate housing subsidy payments for participants in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program and demonstrate that these subsidies are significantly related to metropolitan quality-of-life differentials. We then estimate amenity-adjusted subsidies and compare these estimates with data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Location Affordability Portal. Our analysis yields three insights regarding the relationship between federal housing assistance payments (HAP), metropolitan quality-of-life differentials, and transportation cost burdens. First, HCV HAP show a strong inverse correlation with household transportation expenditures, and this is particularly pronounced for low-income households. Thus, HAP do not address location affordability because those living in high-transportation cost metropolitan areas receive the lowest housing subsidies. Second, we present evidence that HAP are positively related to metropolitan quality-of-life differentials. This suggests that high-amenity metropolitan areas also tend to be the most affordable from a transportation cost perspective. Third, our proposed amenity-adjusted HAP strongly reduce the inverse relationship between HAP and transportation cost burdens.     

Shelter Poverty in Ohio: An Alternative Analysis of Rental Housing Affordability

ABSTRACT

In the United States, housing is most commonly considered unaffordable when a household spends more than 30% of income on housing and utilities. Although easy to calculate, it fails to account for how other categories of essential expenses affect income available to spend on housing. This article compares the ratio-based approach with shelter poverty, a measure that accounts for these elements, evaluating differences in results between the two methods among renters in Ohio. Shelter poverty identifies a higher rate of households in economic distress due to housing market conditions. Further, the average “affordability gap” is four times higher using the shelter poverty than with the 30% threshold. Relative to shelter poverty, the ratio method underestimates the unaffordability of rental housing in economically distressed areas, as measured by median household income, and modestly overestimates it in high-income areas.     

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.     

Gentrification and Fair Housing: Does Gentrification Further Integration?

ABSTRACT

On the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, long-time residents of cities across the country feel increasingly anxious that they will be priced out of their homes and communities, as growing numbers of higher-income, college-educated households opt for downtown neighborhoods. These fears are particularly acute among black and Latino residents. Yet when looking through the lens of fair housing, gentrification also offers a potential opportunity, as the moves that higher-income, white households make into predominantly minority, lower-income neighborhoods are moves that help to integrate those neighborhoods, at least in the near term. We explore the long-term trajectory of predominantly minority, low-income neighborhoods that gentrified over the 1980s and 1990s. On average, these neighborhoods experienced little racial change while they gentrified, but a significant minority became racially integrated during the decade of gentrification, and over the longer term, many of these neighborhoods remained racially stable. That said, some gentrifying neighborhoods that were predominantly minority in 1980 appeared to be on the path to becoming predominantly white. Policies, such as investments in place-based, subsidized housing, are needed in many gentrifying neighborhoods to ensure racial and economic diversity over the longer term.     

Social rehousing policy in britain: Needs,rights, and choices

Abstract

When selecting among competing applicants for rehousing in social rented property, the perceived wisdom in Britain since the 1940s has been to award priority to households in the greatest housing need. “Need” is often defined in highly complex ways. However, a shift has occurred in local authority and housing association rehousing policies away from allocations made solely on the basis of need. This shift comes in response to the changing context in which social rented housing has operated in the past 15 years and to perceived weaknesses in needs‐based systems. Present policies are designed to address wider objectives, including developing stable communities and minimizing housing management problems.

This article examines these policy changes and the extent to which local housing allocations are used to address not only individual household needs, but also the concerns of local communities and wider housing management issues.     

Who benefits from preservation: The people behind the numbers

Abstract

This paper summarizes available information about the characteristics of the 4.4 million renter households in federally assisted housing. Where possible, characteristics are summarized by housing program and include information on income levels and sources, elderly and family households, and minority households. The story of a below market interest rate housing complex in Burlington, Vermont, illustrates the people at risk and one approach to preserving their housing. Accounts by elderly persons displaced in conversions of buildings subsidized under Farmers Home Administration rental assistance bring home the reality of the hardships faced by households at risk. An appendix addresses threats to the continued provision of assisted housing, including owner options to convert properties to market purposes, default, and the much more general issue of continued federal support.