Housing Affordability and Child Well-Being

We test three hypotheses about the role of housing affordability in child cognitive achievement, behavior, and health. Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we apply both propensity-score matching and instrumental-variable modeling as identification strategies and test the sensitivity of results to omitted variable bias. The analysis reveals an inverted-U-shaped relation between the fraction of income devoted to housing and cognitive achievement. The inflection point at approximately 30% supports the long-standing rule-of-thumb definition of affordable housing. There is no evidence of affordability effects on behavior or health.     

Economic Prosperity and Housing Affordability in the United States: Lessons from the Booming 1990s

The United States is facing an acute shortage of reasonably priced housing with over 35% of households paying more than 30% of their income for housing costs in 2015. As the U.S. economy recovers from the Great Recession, will housing become less unaffordable as incomes rise and households could potentially pay a lower share of their income for housing costs? To see if this is likely, I examined the change in housing affordability in the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States between 1990 and 2000, a period of exceptional economic prosperity. I used the percentage of housing cost-burdened households (those that pay more than 30% of their gross income on ownership or rental costs) as a measure of the availability of reasonably priced housing. I used discriminant analysis techniques to detect statistically significant differences in the percentage of cost-burdened households in the 100 MSAs based on a variety of factors. I found that despite the phenomenal economic prosperity of the 1990s, about 30% of households were cost-burdened both in 1990 and 2000. High MSA median income was correlated with a greater shortage of reasonably priced housing. Neither economic growth rate nor poverty rate nor population growth rate distinguished high-shortage MSAs from low-shortage ones. Large MSAs and MSAs in the West had greater shortages than other MSAs. Economic prosperity did not alleviate the problem of lack of reasonably priced housing in the past, and is not likely to do so in the near future. Planners and policy-makers need to enact new policies at local, regional, state, and federal levels to effectively address America’s chronic affordable housing shortage.     

Housing Affordability and Health: Evidence From New York City

It is generally understood that households make tradeoffs between housing costs and other living expenses. In this article, we examine the relationship between health-related outcomes and housing-induced financial burdens for renters in one of the most expensive cities in the world, New York, New York. Drawing from the Housing Vacancy Survey for 2011, a representative survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau of more than 16,000 households in New York City, we estimate the effect of housing cost burden on the overall health of renters and the extent to which they have postponed various types of medical services for financial reasons. Results show that higher out-of-pocket rent burdens are associated with worse self-reported health conditions and a higher likelihood to postpone medical services for financial reasons. This relationship is particularly strong for those households with severe rent burdens. In addition, housing cost burden is equally or more important than other physical housing characteristics in explaining the variation in self-reported general health status and health care postponement. These findings are robust across specifications with different degrees of household, unit/building, and neighborhood controls, and among longstanding and newer renters. Our findings point to the importance of considering health-related outcomes when designing housing policies, and that housing subsidies should target both renters' out-of-pocket costs and place-based repair and maintenance.     

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.     

Political Attention and Public Policy: A Study of How Agenda Setting Matters

Political science research on agenda setting has been focused on how and why political agendas change over time. This article addresses the different but equally important question about how agenda setting actually matters to the policy outputs of national policy making. Do changes in the political agenda foreshadow changes in public policies? And does the effect of changes in the political agenda depend upon the policy preferences expressed by the mass public? Integrating research on policy agendas with well‐established ideas about re‐election‐oriented representation, this article offers a new approach to the study of such agenda effects. Furthermore, it demonstrates the empirical validity of this approach using a Danish dataset of public opinion, public policy and the national political agenda spanning a quarter of a century and covering several different issues.     

Remaking New Zealand's Economic Policy: Institutional Elites as Radical Innovators 1984–1993

During the mid-1980s and early 1990s the New Zealand economy moved from being one of the most regulated outside the former communist bloc to among the most liberal in the OECD. Largely unheralded and begun by an ostensibly social democratic Labour government, changes included the floating of the exchange rate; extensive liberalization of financial, capital and other markets; lowering of trade protection; fiscal restraint and monetary disinflation; changes to the machinery of government; corporatization and then sale of state assets; and changes to industrial relations frameworks (Castles, Gerritsen and Vowles 1996). Known as Rogernomics after Minister of Finance Roger Douglas, these economic policies were heavily derivative of neoclassical economic theories, such as the New Classical and Chicago schools, public choice and new institutional economics (Boston et al. 1996, ch. 2; Goldfinch 1997). This article explains how such radical economic restructuring occurred through the influence of a select group of strategically located institutional elites.     

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.     

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.     

Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-pressures and Black Partisanship

Black Americans are a core Democratic constituency, despite holding views on social issues that put them in conflict with the party. Conventional wisdom attributes this partisan commitment to the salience of race and concerns about racial inequality. This paper considers whether the Democratic bias derives in part from low levels of political knowledge. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study, this paper examines how political knowledge moderates the relationship between social issue cross-pressures and partisan attitudes among Black Americans. I demonstrate that the extent to which Democratic allegiance persists despite policy disagreements depends on whether blacks are sufficiently knowledgeable to act on their policy views, and not simply on the importance that blacks assign to their racial commitments. It is only among politically knowledgeable Black Americans that social issue cross-pressures are at all politically consequential; for them, Democratic partisanship is resilient but not immune to policy disagreements. For blacks with low levels of political knowledge, partisan support is unaffected by policy disagreements. This pattern is most pronounced among religiously active Black Evangelicals, for whom social issues are highly salient.     

Measuring the Effectiveness of New Approaches to Housing Support Policy for Persons with Disabilities

Housing support policy for persons with disabilities who require access to 24‐hour formal or informal support is changing throughout Australia. This is consistent with international trends including: independent living in generic housing; facilitating choices about where and with whom people live; individualised home‐based support; and community integration. Are these trends leading to policies that are effective in the Australian context? This article presents a framework for analysing the effectiveness of new approaches to housing support using a rights perspective. The framework consists of four domains: client outcomes; administrative systems; service viability; and coordination between formal and informal carers. Applying the framework to six case studies found that they all aim to foster independence, while providing effective individualised, holistic housing support.     

American Think Tanks: Policy Elites and the Politicization of Expertise

This article examines policy expertise and the role of think tanks in the context of shifting political alignments in American government. The article first considers the radical and neoconservative critiques of the liberal use of an elite group — or "new class"— of policy experts to formulate and legitimate political reform agendas, a strategy said to represent a technocratic threat to the future of representative government. The discussion then focuses in particular on the neoconservative critique and its promotion of a counter strategy designed to politicize policy expertise through the development of a conservative "counterintelligensia" and the funding of partisan think tanks. The political outcome is seen to be a significant variation in the relationships linking expertise, think tanks, and the setting of national policy agendas. Elite think tanks, conceptualized as policy "discourse coalitions," are analyzed as institutional mechanisms for coordinating the advice of leading policy experts with the interests of economic and political elites. Although the experts' role in these policy-planning organizations falls short of the threat envisioned by the technocratic critique, the political implications of the emergent elite relationship between expertise and policy formation is nonetheless seen to pose troubling questions for both the theory and parctice of representative governance.     

Affordability After Subsidies: Understanding the Trajectories of Former Assisted Housing in Florida

Each year, thousands of units are lost from the assisted rental housing inventory through deterioration and default, subsidy expiration, and market-rate conversion. While a good deal of research and data collection has focused on identifying at-risk developments, less is known about what happens to former assisted developments after they exit income and rent restrictions. This article uses a survey of former assisted properties in Florida to identify their postsubsidy trajectories—that is, as to whether developments continue as rental housing, are converted to condominiums, or leave the housing stock through vacancy and demolition; and for those that continue as rental housing, whether they continue to offer affordable rents. Using logistic regression models, the article examines the property, housing market, and neighborhood characteristics that determine these trajectories. The results show that smaller properties, those that have been out of subsidy programs longer, and those in stronger neighborhood housing markets are more likely to be converted to condominiums. Among developments that continue as rental housing, those that previously had more stringent rent restrictions, those in strong rental submarkets, and those with better transit access tend to become unaffordable compared with previous rent limits.     

Democracy and Bureaucracy: How their Quality Matters for Popular Satisfaction

This study focuses on how citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is affected by system factors related to the input side of the democratic system, i.e. the electoral dimension, as well as to factors related to the output side, i.e. the quality of government. The study investigates the extent to which different election system characteristics and degrees of policy representation (in terms of ideological congruence between voters and representatives) and the presence of effective, professional and impartial governmental institutions are related to citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works. The study uses data from CSES on individual voters and party system characteristics together with data on governmental institutions from the QoG Institute. Overall, the results indicate that factors such as government effectiveness are of greater importance for citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy functions, compared to factors like ideological congruence on the input side. Impartial and effective bureaucracies matter more than representational devices.     

Measuring What Matters: A Call for a Meaningful Metric of Affordable Rental Housing Production Cost-Efficiency

The metric commonly used in debates and research concerning the cost-efficiency of multifamily rental housing production, total development cost per unit, sacrifices too much analytical power in return for its ease of computation. This article proposes a replacement metric, the subsidy per housing affordability equivalent (SHARE) ratio. This measure is applied to a set of 399 nonprofit-sponsored rental housing developments completed in California over the past decade. Evidence suggests that the use of SHARE would evaluate deeply subsidized family projects and mixed-use projects with commercial space more favorably than total development cost per unit would. The reverse is true for projects restricted to seniors and for those financed with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.     

经济适用房还是公共租赁房?——对住房保障政策改革的反思

为了评估当前各地住房保障政策的改革,本文辨析了经适房的缺陷与成因.基于政策的演化过程通过前后对比发现,经适房政策正在向商品房与保障性住房严格分类管理的方向改革,影响其政策声誉与执行效果的制度缺陷已逐步得到改善.针对停建经适房转而兴办公租房的观点,本研究通过定性分析和模糊评价法发现,如果不能引入有效的激励机制和完善监管手段,采用公租房并不能消除经适房原有的大部分缺陷,除了一定程度上抑制腐败和扩大了保障范围之外,甚至有可能恶化住房保障水平.因此迫切需要对当前改革的理论与实践进行反思.     

No Home for Housing: The Situation of the Commonwealth's Housing Policy Advisory Function

The Commonwealth's policy capacity with regard to housing policy and provision has been erratic and patchy. Partly this is because housing was not traditionally a formal Commonwealth responsibility but something in which Commonwealth governments episodically intervened, and partly it was because Commonwealth ministers often did not exercise demand for policy advice in this area. When policy capacity was exercised it tended to define housing narrowly as a welfare initiative, thereby limiting its conception and excluding other important questions and problems involved with housing as a policy domain. This trajectory meant that the advisory deficiencies of the Commonwealth were often exposed at exactly those times when they were most needed. It also meant that the Commonwealth lacked the detailed knowledge and understanding of housing issues when it was called upon to deliver various programs. The article argues that the Commonwealth needs to adopt a more strategic housing policy that addresses longer term needs as well as the economic, social and environmental consequences of its housing policy.