Creating a Nuisance? Housing Nuisance Ordinances and their Impacts on Student Outcomes

• In Event: Housing (In)stability and K-12 Schools: New Evidence on Linkages, Impacts on Student Outcomes, and Remedies

Abstract

While educational research has primarily focused on how in-school factors (e.g., teacher quality, funding) affect students, attention is shifting to the educational impacts of out-of-school elements like housing. Housing instability affects K-12 students by increasing homelessness and school and residential mobility (Holme, 2022). Instigating instability are laws such as nuisance ordinances, which are widely used and are meant to discourage criminal activity by assessing fines on property owners whose residents engage with emergency services. In practice, these policies increase evictions and undermine housing security (Kroeger & La Mattina, 2020; Desmond & Valdez, 2013).

This study provides the first causal evidence for the impact of these laws on educational outcomes using a novel dataset from Ohio. We ask:

1. What is the effect of citywide nuisance ordinances on students’ outcomes?
2. What is the effect of these laws on potential student, school, and district mechanisms?
3. Do observed impacts vary by theoretically-related student-, school-, or district-level characteristics, such as race or level of economic disadvantage?

We draw on data related to nuisance ordinances in Ohio from 2000-2016 (Mead et al. 2017), data from the Eviction Lab (Desmond et al., 2018) on city-level measures of evictions, and restricted-use educational administrative data shared by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) through an executed data use agreement. Our primary outcomes of interest include students’ performance on state standardized tests, educational attainment, and exclusionary discipline. For mechanisms, we draw on student-level data related to absenteeism, school and residential mobility, and homelessness. We also analyze longitudinal school- and district-level sociodemographic information to understand implications for enrollment, composition, and segregation.

Our analytic sample includes students who live in one of the 45 cities that passed a nuisance ordinance between 2000 and 2016 and the remaining population in approximately 200 cities. To estimate causal effects, we employ difference-in-differences (DID) and event study (ES) approaches. For the first difference, we compare outcomes in cities with these laws before and after their passage. For the second difference, we compare these pre-post changes to those contemporaneously observed in cities without nuisance ordinances. The first difference captures time-invariant differences between cities with and without the laws, and the second difference reflects shifts across Ohio in outcomes over time. To address potential bias in DID models that rely on quasi-random variation resulting from the staggered rollout of treatment (Goodman-Bacon, 2021), we employ the two-stage estimation framework recommended by Gardner (2022).

Our preliminary results show that after the passage of nuisance ordinances, cities experienced statistically significant increases in both eviction rates and eviction filing rates of approximately .4 and .7 increases per 100 renter occupied houses, respectively (on top of baseline rates of 3.18 and 6.54, respectively). We will next analyze the student data from ODE.

Our study sheds light on the mechanisms that link housing and education by bridging a critical gap in our understanding of how housing policies affect educational performance. As such, it will provide important cross-sector implications for policymakers, advocates, and educators.

Authors

• Mark Chin, Vanderbilt University

• Tasminda Dhaliwal, Michigan State University