Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Improving the Housing Choice Voucher Program

(Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy)

Research shows that the Housing Choice Voucher Program reduces rent burdens, poverty and homelessness. But as successful as the program is, there is significant room for improvement, and the papers in this panel explore strategies for reform. The first paper examines the inherent tradeoffs in the ‘rationed good’ that rental assistance is, and explores alternative strategies for selecting recipients among the many needy households who apply. The second paper considers an additional component of who ultimately benefits from vouchers: the ability of voucher recipients to successfully use vouchers to rent homes. This paper examines whether Source of Income Discrimination laws improve a recipient’s success at ‘leasing up’ as well as whether such laws appear to expand housing and neighborhood choices for voucher recipients. The final two papers further explore locational outcomes, in particular the clustering of voucher recipients in distressed neighborhoods, one of the most common criticisms of the voucher program and the subject of much recent attention by policy makers and practitioners. One draws on administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to provide a rich description of the neighborhoods where voucher holders reside in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas and identify possible drivers of differences in voucher concentration across them. The other paper presents new findings from HUD’s Small Area Fair Market Rent Demonstration program, which pegged voucher subsidy levels to the rent in the ZIP Code rather than the metropolitan area in hopes of expanding housing choices for voucher recipients.