The Reconcentration of Poverty: Patterns of Housing Voucher Use, 2000 to 2008

In theory, housing choice vouchers provide low-income families with increased neighborhood options. However, previous research is mixed regarding whether the program promotes integration. Examining the 50 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas, I find that households using vouchers are more economically and racially segregated than an extremely low-income comparison group. However, voucher households in areas with source-of-income protection laws are less racially segregated than voucher households in areas without such laws.     

Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move.     

Why voucher and certificate users live in distressed neighborhoods

Abstract

The Section 8 voucher and certificate program potentially allows recipients to choose better neighborhoods than they might otherwise be able to afford. This article compares the location of households using Section 8 vouchers and certificates with the location of other renter households, both low‐income renters and all renters.

In 1998, Section 8 users were 75 percent as likely as other poor tenants to live in distressed neighborhoods but 150 percent more likely than all renters to live in such tracts. These national averages obscure substantial variation among metropolitan areas. Section 8 users concentrate in distressed neighborhoods when rental housing concentrates there, but they avoid distressed neighborhoods with very low rents. Concentration also hinges on race; when assisted households are mostly black and other residents are mostly white, assisted households are much more likely to live in distressed neighborhoods.     

The Gautreaux Legacy: What Might Mixed‐Income and Dispersal Strategies Mean for the Poorest Public Housing Tenants?

Abstract

The current transformation of public and assisted housing reflects the legacy of the Gautreaux case, which created the first mobility and scattered‐site programs. Mixed‐income and dispersal strategies now dominate federal housing policy, although their focus has shifted. Drawing on evidence from two preliminary studies of public housing transformation in Chicago, we argue that these new strategies seem to offer benefits for distressed public housing communities but also involve risks for the most vulnerable current tenants. Increased screening and/or the need to compete with private market tenants may force these families out of the assisted housing market.

Addressing the complex needs of the most troubled public housing tenants will call for a more comprehensive solution. The intent of the Gautreaux case was to increase opportunity and enhance quality of life for public housing tenants; policy makers should take steps to ensure that current programs reflect these fundamental goals.     

The impact of neighbors who use section 8 certificates on property values

Abstract

This article statistically examines the sale prices of single‐family homes surrounding Section 8 sites first occupied between 1991 and 1995 in Baltimore County. If only a few Section 8 sites were located within 500 feet, we found a strong positive impact on property values in higher‐valued, real‐appreciation, predominantly white census tracts. However, in low‐valued or moderately valued census tracts experiencing real declines in values since 1990, Section 8 sites and units located in high densities had a substantial adverse effect on prices within 2,000 feet, with the effect attenuated past 500 feet. Focus groups with homeowners revealed that the negative impact was based on the units’ imperfect correlation with badly managed and maintained properties.

We argue that policies should be devised to direct Section 8 households away from vulnerable neighborhoods, better regulate managers of Section 8 apartments, and more stringently screen and monitor Section 8 households.     

Comment on Langley C. Keyes et al.’s “Networks and nonprofits: Opportunities and challenges in an era of federal devolution”

Abstract

Housing markets are determined by a complex interplay of consumers and suppliers. The Keyes et al. article discusses the changing landscape for nonprofit housing providers and what recent developments in federal housing assistance policy will mean to them. But this perspective is too narrow to predict the effects of changes in federal housing policy because all housing providers are somewhat interrelated. All housing providers need to be considered, and using the terms “for‐profit” and “nonprofit” to distinguish between the two types of providers is unfortunate and misleading.

For‐profits and nonprofits are fundamentally different: They place a different emphasis on community, and nonprofits can often deliver subsidies that for‐profits cannot. In addition, the strengths and the skills needed to produce housing under somewhat different objectives have led to some specialization. Ultimately, however, determining the optimal provider or mix of providers is best left to local and state governments as federal housing assistance devolves.     

The challenges facing public housing authorities in a brave new world

Abstract

Public housing authorities (PHAs) are entering a brave new world. Major proposed changes to the public housing program will force PHAs to compete with private sector providers for tenants. To succeed, they will have to act more like entrepreneurial market participants: to change their management practices, the types of tenants they house, and the kinds of developments they operate, and to attract private capital for the development and operation of public‐private public housing ventures.

PHAs must confront the challenges of transformation while pursuing four mutually conflicting goals: housing the neediest, achieving diversity of tenantry, cross‐subsidizing by attracting unsubsidized tenants, and attracting private capital. Success, or even survival, may require sacrificing one or more of these goals. Whether PHAs can increase housing production to such an extent that they can provide sufficient housing for the neediest while fulfilling the other goals as well remains unclear.     

Comment on Roberto G. Quercia and George C. Galster's “The challenges facing public housing authorities in a brave new world”

Abstract

We find Quercia and Galster's article on reforming public housing an intriguing academic exercise that contains some key insights useful to practitioners. However, the article fails to consider several key elements in the provision of assisted housing that make their “constrained quadrilemma” much less problematic than they assume.

The article ignores the tenant‐based certificate/voucher approach to meeting the housing needs of low‐income and very low income persons and households. This is a significant oversight, in that many public housing authorities (PHAs) manage a larger portfolio of certificates than of PHA‐owned housing. If the litmus test of the success of public housing's “reinvention” is the extent to which it is able to maximize both the number of low‐income households served and their social and geographic integration, then public housing's extensive use of certificate/voucher programs demonstrates a road out of the quadrilemma.     

Restoring community through traditional neighborhood design: A case study of Diggs town public housing

Abstract

This article examines how traditional neighborhood design (TND) can restore a sense of community to distressed neighborhoods. Traditional neighborhoods, such as those found in many cities and inner suburbs, provide their residents numerous opportunities and venues for social interaction. We apply the principles of TND to the redesign of a public housing project. We call our approach an “architecture of engagement.”

Using a case study of Diggs Town, a public housing project in Norfolk, VA, we explore how the application of TND principles transformed a socially alienated and distressed neighborhood into a socially integrated and functional one. We find that TND techniques improve the quality of life by facilitating the social exchanges that create social capital.     

Interpreting the dynamics of public housing: Cultural and rational choice explanations

Abstract

This article uses culture of poverty and rational choice theories of poverty to explain how quickly nonelderly household heads leave public housing. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics serve as the basis for the analysis.

Although a significant proportion of all household heads have public housing spells lasting five or more years, the majority have spells lasting less than five years. The availability of other housing options has a strong impact on how quickly individuals move out of public housing. Family structure and human capital play a more modest role. To the extent that one's childhood experiences affect the likelihood of exiting public housing, they appear to do so mostly through their effect on the acquisition of human capital. Finally, the evidence presented is inconsistent with the notion that public housing is a trap from which it is more difficult to escape the longer one lives in it.