Mitigating the Stress of Housing Instability: The Impact of Housing Choice Vouchers on Social Supports, Behavioral Health, and Criminal Justice Involvement

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.

ABSTRACTTo 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.

About 1.8 million older adults receive rental assistance in the United States, but surprisingly little is known about their health, especially among the growing number of older housing choice voucher (HCV) holders. This is the first known study to use nationally representative data (2006-2018) from the National Health Interview Survey merged with Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative data to describe the health of older HUD renters (N = 4,582) living in public housing, multifamily housing, or receiving an HCV. Logistic regression models were used to examine potential health differences by HUD program type. Contrary to expectations, the results suggest that older HCV holders were more likely to experience health challenges compared to older adults with project-based assistance. The results bring awareness to the health challenges experienced by older HCV holders and emphasize the need for future research to examine why older HCV holders are more likely to experience these health challenges. Policy makers and program administrators must consider how the HCV program has significantly aged in the past two decades and consider what program and policy changes are necessary to ensure that older adults have access to affordable housing that matches their changing needs and preferences.

We investigate whether racial disparities exist among homeless families with priority access to the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. The families we studied moved from emergency shelter into subsidized housing and sometimes left the HCV program, and our results suggest that the HCV program works as well for Black families as it does for White families. The rates at which families used the vouchers to lease a housing unit are similarly high for each group. The rate at which families exit from the HCV program does not differ between White and Black families, but the factors that predict exit do differ by race. For all families, access to a voucher reduces returns to homelessness, doubling up, and moving. These results confirm that in the United States—a country with a history of racial disparities in housing—the HCV program can help alleviate the effects of severe poverty and provide housing opportunities that advantage both White and Black families.

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.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program represents the largest subsidized housing program in the United States. While families with vouchers can, in theory, lease any housing of reasonable quality renting below a rent ceiling, the empirical evidence suggests that they rarely use their vouchers to move to lower poverty neighborhoods. This paper examines the question of how spatial boundaries impact the residential possibilities of HCV subsidized families, both the visible boundaries of Public Housing Authority (PHA) catchment areas and the invisible boundaries of racial and economic segregation. I use administrative data supplied by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which includes all moves by HCV families between 2005 and 2015 in the Baltimore, MD, Cleveland, OH, and Dallas, TX, metropolitan areas. Using a Louvain method of network cluster detection, I subdivide each metro into distinct mobility clusters—sets of census tracts within which voucher holders move but between which they rarely do. I find that the empirical mobility clusters at the metropolitan level are highly defined by PHA’s catchment areas. Even though families are technically allowed to “port” their voucher from one PHA catchment area to another, such behavior is rare. Within the PHA catchment areas, HCV mobility clusters are defined by patterns of race, income, and history. These findings suggest that patterns of racial and economic segregation seem to partially define the mobility clusters within PHA catchment areas, but not across them.

Since 1980, the focus of American housing policy has shifted away from project-based to tenant-based subsidies, i.e. the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP). Yet many HCVP recipients have remained in high-poverty and high-minority areas of central cities. To improve the effectiveness of HCVP in expanding residential choices, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is encouraging local public housing authorities to utilize a variety of techniques to provide more opportunity for voucher recipients to move to low poverty areas including meetings with current or prospective owners, owners’ newsletters, owner fairs, program videos and direct contact with owners. Although there has been a considerable body of research on voucher recipients in the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity programs, two special housing voucher programs, there has been little research on the effectiveness of landlord outreach efforts as part of the regular HCVP. We therefore conducted a case study of landlord outreach efforts currently being implemented by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. We combined observation of landlord outreach events with semi-structured interviews to determine reasons why landlords do or do not participate, landlords’ perceptions on the extent to which HCVP addresses their concerns, what they take away from these events, and how outreach efforts might be improved. This case study indicates that there is considerable room for improvement in landlord outreach efforts by the housing authority. The policy implications for HUD as well as public housing authorities across the United States are discussed.

What do we know about housing choice vouchers?

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, which is the largest rental subsidy program in the United States, relies on the participation of landlords. Research shows, however, that not all landlords are willing to participate. The present study analyzes qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with landlords (N = 25) in an effort to deepen our understanding of their experiences with the HCV program, and specifically, to explore the challenges they face in communicating with the public housing authority (PHA). The sample comes from a city where the financial incentive to participate is not strong, and a lack of source of income protections makes landlord participation more voluntary. Landlords reported communication issues with the local PHA as one of the biggest challenges of working with the program—specifically, difficulty interacting with staff and accessing program information. Ultimately, these communication issues created negative experiences for landlords, characterized by frustration and feeling unsupported, which led some to reduce their participation. These findings suggest a need to improve communication between PHAs and currently participating landlords, especially in light of recent expansions in the HCV program.

Previous research on the housing choice voucher (HCV) program has focused on neighbourhoods where voucher holders reside at one point of time. Little is known about mobility of voucher households during their tenure in the program. Using an administrative dataset that spans 11 years for the state of Florida, this study evaluates how often voucher households move and their mobility outcomes, measured by the change of neighbourhood poverty. Findings reveal that HCV households moved frequently beginning in the early years of program participation. Between 2007 and 2013 there was a notable decrease of voucher presence in high-poverty areas. Regression analysis further suggests that rental housing market conditions are significantly associated with mobility outcomes. White, non-Hispanic households and those with higher incomes were more likely to move to lower poverty neighbourhoods, whereas disabled and formerly homeless households moved more frequently and were not as successful in accessing lower poverty areas.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program is the largest housing subsidy program in the United States, serving over 2.2 million households. Through the program, local public housing authorities (PHAs) provide funds to landlords on behalf of participating households, covering a portion of the household’s rent. Given the reliance on the private market, there are typically many more locational options for HCV households than for traditional public housing, which has a set (and declining) number of units and locations. The growth of this program has been robust in recent decades, adding nearly 1 million vouchers in the last 25 years. This has been a deliberate attempt to move away from the traditional public housing model toward one that emphasizes choice and a diversity of location outcomes through the HCV program. There are many reasons for these policy and programmatic shifts, but one is undoubtedly the high crime rates that came to be the norm in and near far too many public housing developments. During the mid-20th century, when the vast majority of public housing units were created, they were frequently sited in undesirable areas that offered few amenities and contained high proportions of low-income and minority households. As poverty further concentrated in central cities due to the flight of higher-income (often white) households to the suburbs, many public housing developments became increasingly dangerous places to live. The physical design of public housing developments was also frequently problematic, with entire city blocks being taken up by large high-rises set back from the street, standing out as areas to avoid within their neighborhoods. There are many quantitative summaries and anecdotal descriptions of the crime and violence present in some public housing developments from sources as diverse as journalists, housing researchers, and architects. Now that the shift to housing vouchers (and the low-income housing tax credit [LIHTC]) has been underway for over two decades, we have a good understanding of how effective these changes have been in reducing exposure to crime for subsidized households. Further, we are beginning to better understand the limitations of these efforts and why households are often unsuccessful in moving from high-crime areas. In studies of moving housing voucher households away from crime, the following questions are of particular interest: What is the connection between subsidized housing and crime? What mechanisms of the housing voucher program work to allow households to live in lower-crime neighborhoods than public housing? And finally, how successful has this program been in reducing participant exposure to crime, and how do we explain some of the limitations? While many aspects of the relationship between subsidized housing and crime are not well understood, existing research provides several important insights. First, we can conclude that traditional public housing—particularly large public housing developments—often concentrated crime to dangerously high levels. Second, we know that public housing residents commonly expressed great concern over the presence of crime and drugs in their communities, and this was a frequent motivation for participating in early studies of housing mobility programs such as Gautreaux in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity experiment. Third, while the typical housing voucher household lives in a lower-crime environment than public housing households, they still live in relatively high-crime neighborhoods, and there is substantial research on the limited nature of moves using vouchers. Finally, while there is research on whether voucher households cause crime in the aggregate, the outcomes are rather ambiguous—some rigorous studies have found that clusters of voucher households increase neighborhood crime and some have found there is no effect. Furthermore, any potential effects on neighborhood crime by vouchers need to be weighed against their effectiveness at reducing exposure to neighborhood crime among subsidized households.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program is the largest rental housing subsidy program in the United States and has the potential to increase housing options for low-income families. In order to realize this potential, however, the program must attract landlords who accept housing choice vouchers. The primary objectives of this study are: 1) to provide insights from Public Housing Authority (PHA) staff on the factors associated with landlord decisions about whether to participate in the program; and 2) to identify a collection of promising and innovative practices that PHAs have used to increase landlord participation. The study provides key insights into landlord participation in the HCV program and the perspectives of PHA staff on factors influencing landlord decisions on whether to participate. The study also identifies a diverse collection of innovative activities adopted by PHAs to mitigate financial concerns among landlords, make the HCV program simpler, and alleviate landlord concerns about HCV tenants. The study finds that a majority of PHA staff interviewed identified financial reasons as the most important factor affecting landlord participation - with payment standards and fair market rents, damage costs and security deposits, and profit motivations cited as key determining factors.

This chapter discusses the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, which helps more than two million low-income households—nearly half with minor children in the home—to pay for modestly priced, decent-quality homes in the private market. The program has reduced housing cost burdens, decreased homelessness, and increased housing stability, but vouchers currently do less than they could to help families live in low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods. Public housing agencies have flexibility to implement strategies to improve location outcomes in their HCV programs. But unless changes in federal policy encourage them to take such steps and to modify counterproductive policies—and reliable funding is available to maintain the number of families receiving HCV assistance and to administer the program effectively—there is little reason to expect better results. Federal, state, and local agencies can make four sets of interrelated policy changes that will help families in the HCV program to live in better locations.

An unprecedented surge in U.S. rental demand in the decade since the housing crisis has raised the specter of a rental affordability crisis, the brunt of which is borne by the most vulnerable segment of low-income households who live in high-wage large metro areas. Against this background, we examine how the “30 percent rule” — the standard rule of thumb that households anywhere should not spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing expenditures — leads to inefficiencies in the context of federal low-income housing policy. Specifically, we quantify how the federal practice of indexing the generosity of individual rent subsidies in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program regardless of local quality-of-life conditions implicitly incentivizes recipients to live in high-amenity areas. Our estimates imply that a good third of housing subsidies corresponds to the value of amenity consumption by HCV households. Our results also suggest that the level of indexation of housing subsidies under the current HCV program is comparatively high, given the strong evidence for non-homothetic household preferences and only weak complementarity between income and amenities. Yet, because the objectives of federal housing policy might privilege social mobility over locational and housing consumption efficiency, our analysis permits the quantification of a novel scenario for housing policy reform that adjusts current housing subsidies by the amenity expenditures of low-income households, permitting national HCV program coverage to increase.

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is the largest federal low-income housing program serving 1.8 million households nationwide. The HCV program serves to promote economically mixed neighborhoods (deconcentration), residential mobility among the recipients, and desegregation. This study evaluates the locational outcomes of the HCV program recipients in Columbus, Ohio from 1999–2005 against the program's policy goals of deconcentration and desegregation by examining the change in poverty and change in racial composition from pre to post-move neighborhoods. The results reveal that the mobility of recipients does not predict a change in poverty and a recipient's race does not predict a change in racial composition in neighborhoods. The findings suggest that the HCV program policy goals of deconcentration and desegregation are currently being met in Columbus, Ohio.