By allowing housing assistance to be portable, the Housing Choice Voucher program has the potential to help poor households reach better quality neighborhoods than they would have been able to otherwise. In practice, research suggests that location outcomes for “standard” voucher holders who are not participating in a public housing relocation program are disappointing (Pendall 2000, Devine 2003, Horn et al. 2014, Galvez, 2012). However, these analyses generally do not include comparison groups for voucher households, and instead rely on threshold neighborhood poverty rates to gauge voucher holder location outcomes. Similarly, little research has examined variations in outcomes by race/ethnicity. There is evidence that black voucher holders live in higher poverty neighborhoods compared to white voucher holders, but these within-program comparisons by race may be an incomplete picture of location patterns since they mirror racial disparities seen among the urban poor population as a whole.

This paper compares voucher holder locations nationwide to those of similarly poor households and renters of the same race/ethnicity, in the same jurisdictions. Using a combination of household-level data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for voucher holder locations in 2004, Low Income Housing Tax Credit unit locations and census data, the voucher holder sample includes nearly 2 million voucher households in 315 metropolitan areas.

Results suggest that, on average, voucher holders live in neighborhoods with moderate poverty rates that appear similar and in some cases worse that the locations of similarly poor households or Low Income Housing Tax Credit unit locations. However, significant variations in neighborhood quality outcomes emerge when results are disaggregated by race—and results are more promising for black households, specifically. Black voucher holders remain in higher-poverty neighborhoods than white voucher households in the same jurisdictions, but live in lower poverty rate and less distressed neighborhoods compared to poor households or renters of the same race. This suggests that vouchers may give black households an opportunity to move to lower poverty neighborhoods than would have been possible without the voucher. Notably, white and Latino voucher holders do not appear to experience the same gains in neighborhood quality compared to poor households or renters of their same race.

This analysis provides new insights into the potential of Housing Choice Vouchers to help poor families reach higher-quality neighborhoods. Results suggest directions for additional research into variations in location outcomes by race, and for policy interventions that may help voucher holders reach high-quality neighborhoods.