Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Housing Choice Voucher Program struggles to help families access low-poverty neighborhoods. While vouchers should theoretically allow families to move to better-off, well-resourced neighborhoods across jurisdictions, in practice voucher holders are no more likely than poor unassisted renters to live in low-poverty communities, and minority voucher users in particular struggle to reach such places. This paper explores a newly introduced incentive in the voucher program in Milwaukee County that could expand its potential to improve locational outcomes by providing security deposit assistance to households who move to a suburban jurisdiction. The Milwaukee County HOME Security Deposit Assistance Program (SDAP) provides clients in the voucher program with a grant of up to $1,000 that can be used to pay for their security deposit, but only on housing units in suburban municipalities, which in Milwaukee County are predominantly white and low-poverty.

Using in-depth interviews we examine how families adjust their housing searches to the offer of security deposit assistance. We distinguish between different levels of use and attempted use of the SDAP, and identify different degrees of searching for each respondent. By selectively capturing this variation in our interview sample, we are able to focus on the factors that influence the decision to search for housing in the suburbs as well as the different constraints and adaptations that influence which households ultimately make a suburban move with the SDAP. This approach follows broader calls in the literature to understand selection bias as a social process rather than a statistical nuisance to be controlled away (i.e. Sampson 2012). We view this paper as a first step in understanding how a policy like the SDAP might be used; in order to do this, it is important to know how it interacts with the contours of the housing search as they exist for low-income families. Our paper also contributes to a burgeoning literature that studies the way low-income families search for housing. We highlight the factors that influence the decision to search for housing in the suburbs, such as the role of housing instability, trade-offs between housing unit and neighborhood preferences, and the impact of discrimination.

Our interviews also suggest two important factors that help families secure a unit in the suburbs. One is access to informal housing search assistance, both from family members and friends and from weak ties. The second factor is what we term landlord persuasion, a set of strategies employed by respondents to get suburban landlords to agree to rent to them, ranging from advocating for the advantages of the voucher program to making personal appeals based on rental record or life circumstances. Overall, we find that a majority of families in our study responded to the SDAP by attempting to find housing in the suburbs, but only a handful were able to successfully lease-up there. With some accompanying policy changes, the SDAP could be made more broadly effective. We conclude with policy suggestions based on our findings that could make suburban searches more promising for voucher holders.