The Impact of Public Housing Conversions on Tenant Composition

• In Event: Revisiting Public Housing as a Potential Solution to America’s Housing Crisis

Abstract

The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program was authorized by Congress in 2012 to help preserve and improve the U.S. public housing stock. The program allows public housing agencies to convert buildings from Section 9 public housing support to project-based Section 8 contracts, which give more flexibility to access both private and public sources of funding for capital needs. As of August 2024, approximately 229,900 public housing units had been converted through the RAD program. There is limited research on the effects of RAD conversions on households living in buildings that convert or how RAD conversion may change the composition of households living in these buildings over time. 

While RAD conversions require that households living in developments at the time of conversion have a right to return after any renovation work, changes to management and waitlist practices could shift how new households are selected to move in after conversion. Some RAD conversions transfer property management from the public housing agency to private management. Converted developments also shift from the public housing waitlist to project-based waitlists with some property manager discretion allowed in prioritization. Shifting to a different waitlist or introducing different prioritizations could mean that the characteristics (such as demographics, income, and rent amounts) of households moving into these developments after conversion may differ from households who moved into these developments prior to conversion, particularly if new private managers are selecting relatively higher-income or less disadvantaged tenants.

RAD conversion could also change the composition of tenants moving out of these developments over time. Tenants living at a development at the time of RAD conversion have the option to move out with a tenant-based voucher after a certain period. The characteristics of tenants who move out of developments with the offered voucher after conversion may differ from households who moved out of these developments previously. Other work has found no significant changes in overall eviction rates after RAD conversion, though it is also possible that the composition of households evicted from developments differs after conversion if management practices change.

Overall, changes in which households move in and out of developments after RAD conversion could shift the average composition of households served by this program over time. A 2018 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office highlighted the lack of evidence on changes to tenant characteristics after RAD conversion, largely due to a lack of systematic analysis using HUD’s data systems (GAO, 2018). 

This paper uses administrative data from HUD on 416,317 households living in 1,725 developments that converted through RAD between 2014 and 2024 to analyze the effects of RAD conversion on the characteristics of households living in converted developments over time. We use a dynamic difference-in-differences design to test for changes in the average characteristics of households in these developments as well as changes in the characteristics of households moving into and out of developments after conversion. We also evaluate any differences in effects depending on whether a development converted through PBV or PBRA, which involve different waitlist practices.

Author

• Elizabeth Lochhead, New York University
  Presenting Author