Panel Paper: Job Accessibility of Housing Choice Voucher Households

Saturday, November 9, 2013 : 3:50 PM
DuPont Ballroom H (Washington Marriott)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Michael Lens, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper estimates the extent to which housing voucher households live near jobs, or whether there exists a spatial mismatch between voucher households and employment. Using tract-level data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on the housing voucher population and tract- and zip code-level employment files from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper uses a distance decay function to estimate job accessibility indices for census tracts in cities with 100,000 people or more. I use these indices to create weighted job accessibility indices for voucher households and comparable populations – public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), and poor renter households – in addition to the total population. I find that public housing households live in census tracts with the greatest proximity to jobs of all these groups by a large margin. Future iterations of this paper will use commuting time data in order to create more precise job accessibility estimates, and use experimental data to identify the effect of job accessibility on the public housing and housing voucher populations.

Full Paper: