Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper explores landlord acceptance of Housing Choice Vouchers in five metro areas, focusing on the relationship between voucher denials and low-income families’ access to opportunity neighborhoods and schools. The portable Housing Choice Voucher program is the nation’s largest rental housing assistance program, each year helping approximately 2.2 million low-income households pay a portion of their private market rents. Vouchers are intended to allow families to move to a wide range of neighborhoods, including those with low poverty rates and high performing schools. In practice, however, voucher holders’ options can be severely constrained and dependent on finding landlords willing to accept vouchers. Voucher holders are not protected under federal fair housing law, and in most of the country landlords can legally deny a renter solely because they use a voucher.

We first present results from a recent five site paired-testing study of landlord acceptance of vouchers, which found that landlords denied housing to testers presenting as voucher holders with young children at rates as high as 78 percent in some places (Cunningham et al 2018). Building on a dataset of nearly 4,000 interactions with landlords and management companies, we explore the relationship between voucher denial rates and access to opportunity neighborhoods and high-performing schools.

We find that in four of our five sites, voucher denial rates are higher in low-poverty neighborhoods. Using GIS data on school attendance boundaries and census tracts, we link voucher acceptance test location data to measures associated with neighborhood and K-12 public school quality. In addition to census tract poverty rates, measures of neighborhood characteristics will include educational attainment of the adult population, racial composition, median household income, and intergenerational mobility. For K-12 schools we will study voucher denial rate correlations with the racial composition of the student body, student proficiency rates in standardized state assessment exams, racial gaps in student achievement, and proximity to charter schools. Altogether, the patterns we uncover will shed light on the types neighborhoods and public schools that are available to voucher holders in our five testing sites, as well as neighborhoods that effectively inaccessible to voucher holders due to discrimination in the private rental market.