You Can’t Get There from Here: Mobility Networks and the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Abstract

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.