Evaluating and Improving the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

As the largest federal rental assistance program, the Housing Choice Voucher program plays a pivotal role in helping low-income families afford safe and stable housing. The program supports over 2.3 million households each year, and has been shown to provide numerous benefits, including reducing rent burdens, homelessness, and overcrowding. However, the program still faces several challenges, including a complex take-up process, difficulty in helping households move to a broad set of neighborhoods, and increasing costs. The four papers in this panel examine different components of the program’s design, administration, and implementation, from program take-up through program exit, to help understand where the program may fall short and what factors can help the program be most effective.

The first paper focuses on the striking decline in the share of households who have been able to use their vouchers, or voucher success rates, in recent years. The authors consider the effects of local market conditions, the availability of voucher-affordable units, and two different sources of policy variation that may have either worsened or curtailed this recent trend. Relatedly, the second paper focuses on utilization rates and success rates for Emergency Housing Vouchers, a subset of the voucher program targeted towards households experiencing homelessness. This mixed-methods study examines how utilization rates and success rates for this special purpose voucher program varied across housing authorities, and which supplemental services were most effective in aiding households in the search process. 

The third paper evaluates a programmatic change to how rent ceilings are determined in the voucher program. The author finds that allowing rent ceilings to vary with ZIP Code level rents leads to more households using their vouchers in lower poverty and higher rent neighborhoods. The paper also studies the short and long term costs associated with this change; while living in higher opportunity neighborhoods does lead to increases in income and rent contributions, which drives down costs in the short run, eventually costs do increase as more households move to high rent neighborhoods, leading housing authorities to serve fewer households.

The fourth paper tracks the locational outcomes of voucher recipients from before they enter the program, through their participation, and after they exit. The author finds that entering the housing voucher program does not lead to significant improvements in neighborhood poverty, while exiting the voucher program leads to significant decreases in neighborhood poverty rates relative to both pre-voucher and voucher locations. However, these effects are driven by white households, with nonwhite households seeing little change.

Combined, these four papers offer insight into each stage of voucher program participation, and shed light on which policies and procedures can help the program to operate most efficiently.

Policy Area

• Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy

Secondary Policy Area

• Poverty and Income Policy

Chair

• Raheem Chaudhry, University of Washington

Discussants

• Susha Bentley Roy, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Arthur Acolin, University of Washington

Organizer

• Sarah Strochak, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Measuring and Explaining the Decline in Voucher Take-up: New Evidence from Administrative Data - Presenting Author: Sarah Strochak, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Ingrid Gould Ellen, New York University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Katherine O'Regan, New York University

• Where Do They Go? Assessing the Long-Term Locational Outcomes of Housing Choice Voucher Recipients - Presenting Author: Alex Ramiller, University of Toronto

• Housing Vouchers and Neighborhood Effects: Can Expanding Access to Opportunity Pay for Itself? - Presenting Author: JoonYup Park, University of Hawaii

• Utilization and Success Rates for Emergency Housing Vouchers: Local Contexts and Supportive Services - Presenting Author: Ryan Finnigan, University of California, Berkeley