Denver Housing Authority Research Articles

Family Self-Sufficiency Program Outcomes for Participants Enrolling During and After the Great Recession

Utilizing administrative data from the Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) Program operated by the Denver Housing Authority, four program outcomes, (a) savings and escrow growth, (b) credit and debt reduction, (c) employment and earnings, and (d) positive exits from subsidized housing, are examined to assess if any differences exist between participants ( n = 424) who enrolled during or after the Great Recession. Propensity score matching with replacement was employed to match FSS enrollees. Compared to post-Great Recession enrollees, results suggest that enrollees entering the program during the Great Recession were more likely to reduce their monthly contractual debt and derogatory debt, increase monthly earned income, and remain in the FSS Program longer. Findings suggest that attaining participant financial capability goals is possible during severe economic shocks and may provide vulnerable families with additional capacity to weather such shocks.

Does pre-purchase counseling help low-income buyers choose and sustain homeownership in socially mixed destination neighborhoods?

ABSTRACT For 3 decades, U.S. federal housing policies have sought to increase access to socially diverse and high opportunity neighborhoods and improve the quality of life for low-income families. Absent from current discussions of the costs and benefits of socially mixed communities is the potential value that they may have to low-income families seeking to purchase their own homes. In this paper, we examine the extent to which participation in homebuyer education and counseling programs supports sustainable low-income homeownership in socially mixed neighborhoods. Using quasi-experimental methodologies and longitudinal data from the Denver Housing Study for a sample of 533 low-income homebuyers, this study examines whether, compared with a comparison group of public housing residents who purchased homes on their own, participants in Denver Housing Authority’s (DHA) homebuyer education and counseling program (HOP) were (1) more likely to purchase homes in socially mixed destination neighborhoods; and (2) sustain homeownership over time. Results show that low-income homebuyers purchased homes in destination neighborhoods characterized by considerable ethnic and income mix. When compared to non-HOP homebuyers, HOP homebuyers also were better off in terms of 2018 home value appreciation and fewer foreclosures, suggesting that homebuyer education and counseling improves long-term sustainability of homeownership.

Engaging residents in affordable housing—resident engagement pilot at Denver Housing Authority Westridge apartments

Denver Housing Authority (DHA) has invested considerably into designing, building, and maintaining a resource efficient portfolio and this effort is becoming increasingly comprehensive as they continuously refine and build upon their approach. One of the more recent strategies was to incorporate resident engagement efforts focused on energy and water efficiency into their programming as a way not only to maximize realized energy savings from these investments but to also to engage with building occupants around sustainability initiatives and develop a holistic approach to reducing their resource consumption. In 2014, DHA hired Energy Outreach Colorado and Group14 Engineering (the Team) to develop and implement a voluntary program designed to encourage positive environmental and social actions around energy and water use. The Team developed a comprehensive resident engagement and outreach program involving on-site staff, resident leaders, and residents. The program plan identified both low/no-cost solutions and more extensive outreach efforts targeted at the DHA Westridge community. Upon completion of the pilot, the program achieved 24,864 kWh (4.5%) savings in electricity consumption. Valued at the 2014 effective blended rate for Westridge, this equals $3493 dollars in annual savings and a program payback of 11 years. The project’s participation goal was exceeded, with 60% of the neighborhood households participating in the program. The team concluded that achieving savings through resident engagement is possible but also the level of effort put forth in the project is important to consider.

Elementary School Difficulties of Low-Income Latino and African American Youth: The Role of Geographic Context

ABSTRACT:Do the geographic contexts in which disadvantaged children are raised influence whether they have difficulties in elementary school? We address this question by estimating Cox proportional hazard models with instrumental variable measures of context, using data for 410 low-income Latino and African American children who lived in Denver public housing before age six. The Denver Housing Authority’s procedure for allocating families to dwellings mimics random assignment, thus offering an unusual natural experiment for measuring context effects isolated from geographic selection bias. We find that several socioeconomic and demographic contextual indicators are statistically and substantively important predictors of low-income Latino and African American children’s difficulties in elementary school, though sometimes in nonlinear and interactive ways. Generally, the hazard of being assigned to special education classes, suspended, or forced to repeat a grade is greater in neighborhoods with higher occupational prestige and percentages of immigrants and lower in those with higher percentages of African American residents.

Neighborhood effects on secondary school performance of Latino and African American youth: Evidence from a natural experiment in Denver

We quantify the relationships between measures of neighborhood context and school performance (repeating a grade, grade point average and dropping out before a diploma is earned) for low-income Latino and African American adolescents ages 12–18. We employ administrative and survey data from a natural experiment involving the Denver Housing Authority's public housing program to minimize geographic selection bias and provide wide variation in neighborhood contexts. We use characteristics of the neighborhood initially offered by DHA to waiting list applicants as identifying instruments for the neighborhood context experienced as an adolescent. Cox proportional hazard models (OLS in the case of grades) demonstrate that neighborhoods having less social vulnerability, higher occupational prestige and lower percentages of African American residents robustly predict superior secondary educational performance in one or more dimensions, though magnitudes are typically contingent on ethnicity.

Adolescent neighborhood context and young adult economic outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos

We quantify how young adult employment and educational outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos relate to their adolescent neighborhood conditions. Data come from surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households who lived in public housing scattered throughout Denver County. Because DHA allocations mimic random assignment to neighborhood, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. We use the neighborhood originally offered by DHA to instrument for neighborhood experienced during adolescence. Our control function logistic analyses found that higher percentages of foreign-born neighbors predicted higher odds of no post-secondary education and (less reliably) neither working nor attending school. Neighborhood occupational prestige predicted lower odds of young adults receiving public assistance and (less reliably) neither primarily working nor attending school. Effects differed for African Americans and Latinos. We consider potential causal processes underlying our results and suggest why they differ from those from the Moving To Opportunity demonstration.

Evaluating the potential of a natural experiment to provide unbiased evidence of neighborhood effects on health

In this paper we advance a dual-prong method for evaluating whether data from a natural experiment can be leveraged to draw convincing implications about causal effects of neighborhood context on health. In particular, we probe a natural experiment’s ability to surmount potentially confounding measurement issues arising from geographic selection bias. We offer methods for assessing the degree of this potential bias both immediately after households are assigned to neighborhoods and over longer durations. We then illustrate these methods using data from a natural experiment involving scattered-site public housing in Denver and test whether neighborhood context affects the hazard of children’s asthma diagnoses. We find that, conditioned on ethnicity, the tenant allocation process used by the Denver Housing Authority produced a quasi-random initial assignment across neighborhood characteristics and that the range of bias arising subsequently through selective out-migration can be narrowly delineated by replicating analyses for alternative samples defined by period of residence in public housing. We further find support for the proposition that observing no correlation between neighborhood and observed household characteristics is tantamount to observing no correlation between neighborhood and (typically) unobserved household characteristics. There appears to be little bias reintroduced through selective out-migration and staying in initially assigned neighborhood. These findings suggest that, after employing the evaluation strategy suggested here, natural experiments can indeed be a powerful tool for assessing neighborhood effects on health.

Employment of Low-Income African American and Latino Teens: Does Neighborhood Social Mix Matter?

We quantify how teen employment outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos relate to their neighborhood conditions during ages 14–17. Data come from surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households who have lived in public housing scattered throughout Denver County. Because DHA household allocation mimics random assignment to neighborhood, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. Our logistic and Tobit regression analyses found overall greater odds of teen employment and more hours worked for those who lived in neighborhoods with higher percentages of pre-1940 vintage housing, property crime rates and child abuse rates, though the strength of relationships was highly contingent on gender and ethnicity. Teen employment prospects of African Americans were especially diminished by residence in more socially vulnerable, violent neighborhoods, implying selective potential gains from social mixing alternatives.

Adrift at the Margins of Urban Society

We quantify how social detachment (measured as neither working nor attending school) of low-income African-American and Latino young adults relates to their teen neighborhood conditions. Data come from retrospective surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households. Because DHA household allocation mimics quasirandom assignment to neighborhoods throughout Denver County, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. Our multilevel, mixed-effects logistic analyses found significant relationships between neighborhood safety and population composition and odds of social detachment of low-income, minority young adults that can be interpreted as causal effects. The strength of these relationships was often contingent on gender and ethnicity, however. We draw conclusions for macroeconomic, income-support, subsidized housing and community development policy.

Strain Distributions in Full-Scale Energy Foundations (DFI Young Professor Paper Competition 2012)

This paper focuses on the thermo-mechanical response of two full-scale energy foundations installed at the new Denver Housing Authority Senior Living Facility in Denver, Colorado. The energy foundations were formed by attaching heat exchanger tubes to the inside of the reinforcement cages of drilled shafts. The heat exchange tubes were connected to a ground-source heat pump system, which circulates a methanol-water mixture through the tubing to absorb or shed heat into the foundation and surrounding soil or rock. Instrumentation was incorporated to assess the heat exchange response of the foundations as well as the thermo-mechanical strains during construction and typical building operation. The temperature changes within the foundations are stable during heating and cooling operations and the corresponding thermal axial strains are within acceptable limits. The thermal axial strain profiles measured for both foundations follow trends expected for end-bearing boundary conditions with greater strains near the top of the foundations (upward expansion). The mobilized thermal expansion coefficients inferred from the instrumentation confirm that side shear stresses provide resistance to thermally induced movements. The results from this study indicate that energy foundations can be implemented in new buildings to gain improved heat exchange capabilities without major impacts on the foundation performance, for little added installation cost.

Denver Housing Authority's Park Avenue HOPE VI revitalization project: community impact results

In 2002, the Denver Housing Authority1 received a HOPE VI grant from HUD in the amount of 20 million dollars to raze and rehabilitate three “severally distressed” public housing communities. Named the Park Avenue HOPE VI Revitalization Project, the purpose was to create both low-income and market-rate housing in an urban environment along with recreation and business opportunities. An evaluation of the community impact of the project has yielded favorable results. Employing a quasi-experimental research design, analyses of the data collected revealed impressive outcomes in three areas. These include a decrease in overall as well as violent crime, increased home-buying activity, and increased property values within a quarter-mile radius of the Park Avenue HOPE VI site. Adding to the many evaluations of HOPE VI projects nationally, this article offers community-level results to further our understanding of federal housing policy and its effects on urban centers. 1Data and support for the study were provided by The Denver Housing Authority. The opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily shared by the Denver Housing Authority.

Low-Income Homeownership: Does It Necessarily Mean Sacrificing Neighborhood Quality to Buy a Home?

ABSTRACT:Questions have been raised about the wisdom of low-income homeownership policies for many reasons. One potential reason to be skeptical: low-income homebuyers perhaps may be constrained to purchase homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is a potential problem because home purchases in such neighborhoods: (1) may limit appreciation; (2) may reduce quality of life for adults; and (3) may militate against reputed advantages of homeownership for children. Our study examines the neighborhood conditions of a group of 126 low-income homebuyers who purchased their first home with assistance from the Home Ownership Program (HOP) operated by the Denver Housing Authority. Our approach is distinguished by its use of a comprehensive set of objective and subjective indicators measuring the neighborhood quality of pre-move and post-move neighborhoods. Do low-income homebuyers sacrifice neighborhood quality to buy their homes? Our results suggest that the answer to this question is more complex than it might at first appear. On the one hand, HOP homebuyers purchased in a wide variety of city and suburban neighborhoods. Nonetheless, a variety of neighborhood quality indicators suggest that these neighborhoods, on average, were indeed inferior to those of Denver homeowners overall and to those in the same ethnic group. However, our analyses also revealed that their post-move neighborhoods were superior to the ones they lived in prior to homeownership. Moreover, very few HOP destination neighborhoods evinced severe physical, environmental, infrastructural, or socioeconomic problems, as measured by a wide variety of objective indicators or by the homebuyers’ own perceptions. Indeed, only 10% of HOP homebuyers perceived that their new neighborhoods were worse than their prior ones, and only 8% held pessimistic expectations about their new neighborhoods’ quality of life. Finally, we found that Black homebuyers fared less well than their Latino counterparts, on average, in both objective and subjective measures.