Why Don't Housing Choice Voucher Recipients Live Near Better Schools? Insights from Big Data

Housing choice vouchers provide low‐income households with additional income to spend on rental housing in the private market. The assistance vouchers provide is substantial, offering the potential to dramatically expand the neighborhoods—and associated public schools—that low‐income households can reach. However, existing research on the program suggests that housing choice voucher holders live in neighborhoods with schools that are no better than those accessible to other households with similar incomes. Households, in other words, do not seem to spend the additional income provided by the voucher to access better schools. In this analysis we rely on a large‐scale administrative data set to explore why voucher households typically do not live near to better schools, as measured by school‐level proficiency rates. We combine confidential administrative data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on 1.4 million housing choice voucher holders in 15 states, with school‐level data from 5,841 different school districts, to examine why the average housing voucher holder does not live near to higher‐performing schools than otherwise similar households without vouchers. Specifically, we use the large‐scale administrative data set to test whether voucher holders living in areas with good schools nearby and slack housing markets move toward better schools when schools become salient for them—that is, when their oldest child becomes school eligible. We take advantage of the thick sample of households with young children provided through our administrative data to implement both a household fixed effects and a regression discontinuity design. Together these analyses shed light on whether voucher households are more likely to move toward better schools when schools are most relevant, and how market conditions shape that response. We find that families with vouchers are more likely to move toward a better school in the year before their oldest child meets the eligibility cutoff for kindergarten, suggesting salience matters. Further, the magnitude of the effect is larger in metropolitan areas with a relatively high share of affordable rental units located near high‐performing schools and in neighborhoods in close proximity to higher‐performing schools. Results suggest that, if given the appropriate information and opportunities, more voucher families would move to better schools when their children reach school age.     

A PARTNERSHIP FOR REGIONAL COLLABORATION

Urban policy is out of alignment with domestic problems arising from the global economy, sprawling metropolitan regions, and distressed neighborhoods. A new urban policy, grandly conceived and dramatically announced and implemented, is needed. Our article maps out a new urban policy framework, with new roles and responsibilities for agencies and institutions, using innovative tools and improved management, with alternative adaptation strategies. Such a policy must be agile and diverse—characteristics not common in federal policy generally.     

Reinvention and retrenchment: Lessons from the application of the New Zealand model to Alberta,Canada

Is New Zealand a model for “reinventing” government and cutting spending? The government of Alberta, Canada, consciously replicated significant elements of the New Zealand model to attain fiscal balance and public sector reorganization, including the core element of restructuring institutions to change individual behavior. Despite broad similarities in policy content and outcome, differences in the specific content of policy and the politics of policy implementation led to differences in the sustainability of reform and the location of budget cuts. Alberta's Progressive Conservative party emphasized expenditure cuts where both the New Zealand Labour and National parties emphasized government reorganization and the introduction of market mechanisms. Contrasting these efforts to balance budgets and reinvent government suggests that there is considerable variation in the “model,” and that left governments in general are probably more likely to pursue and succeed at the reinvention of government, while stinting fiscal balance. Right governments, on the other hand, are more likely to achieve short-run fiscal balance at the expense of successful reinvention. In turn this suggests that while the partisan orientation of the reforming party matters, neither has an ideal policy mix for long-term fiscal stability. Alternation of governments may provide the best policy mix.     

A 21st Century Developmentally Appropriate Juvenile Probation Approach

Principles of adolescent development have accelerated positive changes to the juvenile justice system. These changes have been most pronounced in reducing reliance on incarceration and in approaches to sentencing of youth tried as adults. While juvenile probation has made some developmentally friendly adjustments, it remains an area that is fertile for reform. Many of the principles and goals in this paper have been endorsed by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), which “supports and is committed to juvenile probation systems that conform to the latest knowledge of adolescent development and adolescent brain science,” and which “recommends that courts cease imposing ‘conditions of probation’ and instead support probation departments’ developing, with families and youth, individualized case plans that set expectations and goals.” 1 NCJFCJ's July, 2017 resolution in support of developmentally appropriate juvenile probation services built on earlier NCJFCJ policies. From the time NCJFCJ adopted Juvenile Delinquency Guidelines in 2005, those policies have grown increasingly robust. 2     

Star Struck in Beijing

正It was in Beijing that I was bitten by the acting bug,with my serious,intellectual look inviting offers to play researchers,scientists and even a doctor in a commercial for a weight loss product.I love acting gigs because they are a wonderful opportunity to engage in creative projects,practice one’s Chinese and make new friends.My most recent gig involved playing a     

Doing Only One Thing

正Call me a calligraphy and Chinese painting junkie.While other women spend their money on designer clothes and shoes,I spend mine on a painting with avantgarde plum blossoms,a faux Qi Baishi or a misty Yel ow Mountain scene in autumn.So,naturally,when a Chinese calligraphy master invited me to his studio,I was excited.What a treat!My limited exposure to calligraphy up to that point consisted of strolling through the National Art Museum     

Review essay: Agrarian transformation,agrarian struggles,and Marxist analyses of the peasantry

Abstract

After some years of living in an Indian village, on family land that by the standards of most Marxist scholars puts us in the category of “capitalist farmers” or “kulaks,” I find myself taking scholarly discussion of “agrarian transformation” and “agrarian class structure” quite personally. There is something that jars against the reality of a daily life that includes hauling water for household use in the morning, enduring frequent blackouts or “load sheddings,” trying to decide whether to purchase first a TV or a refrigerator or a washing machine and not really being able to afford any of them, to be told that in moving from a salaried position in a U.S. university to an Indian village one has made a class jump upwards, from a section of the “expanded working class” or at worst “petty bourgeoisie” to membership among the capitalists and even (according to some scholars) participation in India's “ruling bloc.”     

New York city and subsidized housing: Impacts and lessons of the city's $5 billion capital budget housing plan

Abstract

New York City has devoted far more resources to the development and rehabilitation of affordable housing than any other U.S. city, investing more than $4 billion from 1986 to 1997. This article surveys the impact, status, and implications of New York's housing programs. It looks at correlations between publicly funded housing starts and changes in the housing stock, welfare rolls, and crime and at the economic impact of the city's housing investments within low‐income neighborhoods.

New York's housing programs have transformed neighborhoods, replacing large swaths of abandoned shells and vacant land with new housing and preserving thousands of buildings at risk of abandonment. While these housing investments correlate most strongly with reductions in vacant units and vacant lots, they also show significant correlations with reductions in welfare rolls and violent crime, but uneven economic impacts as well. New York's housing programs are important nationally less for the specifics of particular programs than for the institutional collaborations on which they are founded.