Promoting Housing Choice In Huds Rental Assistance Programs

Provides the first empirical evidence that the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) tenant-based certificate and voucher programs are already much less likely than public housing to concentrate needy households in poor urban neighborhoods. Evaluates the implementation and effects of existing demonstration and judicially mandated programs that help minority families receiving section 8 certificates and vouchers to move out of areas with high concentrations of minority persons. Charts and tables.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) rental assistance programs are tasked with providing economically disadvantaged families and individuals with safe and adequate housing. Previous research has demonstrated that unsubsidized tenants tend to report higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction than do HUD-assisted tenants, and that public housing tenants report lower levels of neighborhood satisfaction as compared to Section 8 project-based tenants and to tenant-based residents who participate in HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program. Among these programs, the HCV program is the only one that gives participants the opportunity to select their housing unit and neighborhood. Using household-level administrative data from the 2013 American Housing Survey (AHS), this paper examines the relationship between participation in the Housing Choice Voucher program and neighborhood satisfaction among recipients of HUD assistance. I find that there is generally no relationship between type of federal rental assistance and neighborhood satisfaction. However, I also find that HCV participants face a tradeoff between housing quality and neighborhood quality, suggesting that there may be limitations to the HCV program’s capacity to improve participants’ satisfaction with their housing options.