Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Research on housing assistance has often focused on the locational decision-making of voucher recipients, impact of voucher usage on neighborhoods, and socio-economic impact of relocation on consumers. Scant attention has been given to the street-level bureaucrats rationing affordable and/or supportive housing vouchers to needy households. Such actors possess institutionally constrained discretion to determine who gets what, when, where, and how. These situated decision-making processes mediate access to stable housing for America’s poorest households. Thus, scholarly neglect of rental assistance rationing is a notable shortcoming in our understanding of U.S. housing policy. I address this gap with an ethnographic study of housing placement meetings conducted by a Continuum of Care (CoC) located in the post-industrial Midwest where supportive housing vouchers are allocated to people experiencing homelessness. Nonparticipant observation, unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews, and archival data are used to delineate 5 dilemmas CoC members encounter while rationing housing assistance according to HUD guidelines: client verification, documentation, detachment, vulnerability, and preferences. In this regard, I delineate each dilemma, the range of options bureaucrats perceive to resolve each problem, the decision-making processes used to address each conundrum, and variation in dilemmas across different types of clients. I conclude with suggested directions for future research and policy recommendations.