Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Housing insecurity is a significant problem and increasingly there is recognition of its critical role in the persistence of poverty. Despite this recognition, measures of housing insecurity are currently inadequate, limiting the field’s ability to fully assess the scope of the problem and track changes over time. Nor do these measures capture how housing insecurity interacts with other forms of material hardship, such as food insecurity.

Housing insecurity can take a number of forms: homelessness, housing cost burden, frequent forced moves or eviction; doubling up with family or friends to share housing costs; overcrowding; living in substandard, poor quality housing; and living in neighborhoods that are unsafe and lack access to transportation, jobs, quality schools, and other critical amenities. While each of these forms of housing insecurity is distinct, in practice there may be a great deal of fluidity as vulnerable, low-income renters move between them. However, these different forms of housing insecurity are often analyzed in isolation, defined differently across studies, surveys, and administrative datasets, which use different metrics in analysis, and make it difficult to draw conclusions about the persistence of housing instability and relative hardship of one form over another. Further, as a coping mechanism, households that experience housing insecurity usually have to make tradeoffs between spending money on housing, food, medicine, and other goods. Housing insecurity is not often measured in surveys that measure other forms of material hardship, including food insecurity, and, therefore, there is a lack of understanding of the tradeoffs between housing and other necessities.

This paper reviews what we know about the dynamics of housing insecurity: what triggers it; how long it lasts; what the trade-offs and coping mechanisms are; and how it ends. We will examine how researchers define and measure housing insecurity and the limitations of these measures. We will focus our review on longitudinal surveys and administrative data that can help track housing insecurity spells from start to finish and draw from lessons learned in developing measures of food insecurity. Finally, we will propose steps towards developing reliable and validated housing measures that can help produce a greater understanding of the problem and track progress towards solving it.