The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program augments the income of poor households giving them the buying power to consume rental housing that would not normally be affordable.  The program also gives poor households the freedom to locate in any neighborhood as long as the housing is reasonably priced and passes a physical inspection. 

Studies of the location patterns of HCV households find that they make short moves from their original location and only marginal improvements in the quality of the neighborhoods in which they reside.  Lens (2013) examined the proximity of assisted housing and households under various programs to job opportunities.  He used a decay function to estimate job accessibility indices for census tracts in MSAs and found that HCV households located in tracts with lower job accessibility than was found for public housing units.  Unfortunately, the data available to him did not permit isolation of HCV households in the workforce from other HCV households, possibly skewing the results.

The research reported in this paper makes use of a special household level dataset from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  These household level data will be analyzed for their location patterns across the metropolitan tracts with their job accessibility ratings as determined by Lens (2013).   These data permit examination of able-bodied, non-elderly HCV households and further permits identification of those HCV households who are employed and those who are not.  With these two populations of HCV households, it will be possible to identify the extent to which the employed HCV recipients in the workforce are located in census tracts with greater access to employment compared to unemployed HCV recipients also in the workforce.  In addition, the dataset will permit identification of these workforce households with dependent children who may inhibit the householders’ capacity to enter into employment.  Finally, the dataset will permit identification of the race and ethnicity of the HCV households so as to calibrate what, if any, differences are found between non-minority and minority members of the workforce.

The results will help program administrators at the federal and local levels to understand the extent to which participating households are able to use the rental assistance to gain access to jobs.  The results will further help program administrators understand what more needs to be done to help move the HCV program to its full potential in serving as a platform for the poor to step out of the cycle of poverty and into gainful employment.