Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

National data on the housing challenges of low-income households are fragmented and incomplete. Data limitations make it difficult to determine the scale and dynamics of the housing affordability problem or the effectiveness of housing assistance programs. Among housing researchers and advocates, there is growing interest in a unified measure of housing insecurity that would combine items related to housing affordability, quality, privacy, and stability into a single scale. Critics point to the different dimensions of housing insecurity and the importance of personal and cultural preferences in prioritizing one dimension over another to raise doubts about the feasibility of a single housing insecurity measure. However, the success of the Core Food Security Module (CFSM), incorporated into the Current Population Survey (CPS) and used by the USDA’s Economic Research Services to measure food insecurity, shows that these challenges can be overcome. This paper is a follow-up to the authors’ 2016 APPAM paper, which made the case for a unified housing measure. The 2017 submission would focus on the practical challenges and opportunities for developing and testing such a measure, drawing from the example of the CFSM.

Our paper would briefly describe the history of the CFSM including the push for congressional action culminating in the 1990 directive to the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services to create a national measure of food insecurity and hunger. It would describe the theoretical and methodological advances that supported the creation of a validated, 18-item instrument that can be converted into a scaled measure with categorical variables ranging from food secure to food insecure with severe hunger.

The remainder of the paper would focus on the opportunities for developing a housing insecurity measure. It would discuss whether, like food insecurity, housing insecurity could be conceptualized through a cascading scale of increasingly unpleasant options in response to economic scarcity. It would assess the state of housing insecurity data collection and analysis and compare it to the state of food insecurity research prior to the 1990 Congressional directive. It would assess opportunities to develop and test different survey items either using recurring national data collection efforts such as the American Housing Survey and the CPS and special multisite survey efforts. It would address what data collection efforts are best suited to capture longitudinal data on housing insecure households. Finally, based on the experiences of developing the CFSM, the paper would try to estimate the level of investment needed to create a standard measure of housing insecurity and whether the potential benefits to the field would merit the costs in resources and time.