Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

With an increased number of households experiencing housing deprivations, social scientists and policy makers have directed their attention to the importance of housing assistance in the multiple domains of people’s life circumstances. One of the economic challenges for needy families is housing, in which case they may double-up with friends or have a higher risk of becoming homeless. Using baseline data from the New York City Longitudinal Survey of Wellbeing study, this research first explores how current New Yorkers live and deal with the multiple living problems in urban New York; second, it aims at assessing the role of housing subsidies in reducing housing-related deprivations, broadly defined to include rent burden, residential crowding and homelessness, and other material hardships among low-income households. The paper is structured into two parts. The first part will present the distribution of three housing outcomes and examine who experiences the numerous housing hardships in New York City. The second section will consider to what extent housing subsidy can mitigate these precarious housing problems in New York City (NYC).

Results show that 55 percent among renter households in NYC have rent burdens. The average percentage of their income spent on rent is 45 percent. 87 percent of those living below the poverty line have a high rent burden, paying 75 percent of their annual income for rent on average. The overcrowding rate in NYC is around 6 percent on average, which is substantially above the national average of 3 percent in 2013. And 10 percent of the population reported experiencing displacement in the past 12 months. Not surprisingly, those with material deprivation tend to have a higher rate of living in a crowded environment and becoming homeless (9 percent and 19 percent, respectively), three times greater than their counterparts with relative resource abundance. Those who have income resources between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty line still receive almost three times less than the people who are affluent. 61 percent of the renters of this group have a high rent burden. Hispanic people disproportionately fall below the poverty line compared to other racial or ethnic groups. In a further step toward evaluating the capability of housing subsidy to reduce the low-income renter’s hardships, multivariate analyses suggest housing assistance programs lead to a significantly lower rent burden and a lower probability of being displaced, compared to the non-subsidized group, but it did not significantly affect households’ overcrowding situations. Moreover, the results show that although a reduction in housing deprivation appears, other economic hardship scores remain high in subsidized households.

Even though positive effects are documented, it appears that current housing assistance programs are still insufficient toward helping more households escape from housing deprivation. The findings testify to the effectiveness of housing assistance in NYC but indicate that a more comprehensive policy should be considered to help disadvantaged families cope with the multiple domains of their life circumstances. Continued support and expanded efforts are needed to improve the housing situations and economic well-being of low-income urban households.