Who gets to wait? Uncertainty in Waiting List Openings for the Housing Choice Voucher Program

• In Event: From Administrative Burden to Participation and Compliance: Local Discretion in Federal Assistance Program Delivery

Abstract

Administrative burden may limit access to public services and programs and impose larger barriers for socioeconomically disadvantaged subgroups (Herd & Moynihan, 2019; Olsen et al., 2020; Bell et al., 2021; Compton et al., 2023). Building on this growing literature, we focus on the Housing Choice Voucher Program (referred to as “HCVP” or “vouchers”) to examine the role of its waiting lists as a source of administrative burden. Unlike other federally funded entitlement programs, such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or the Earned Income Tax Credit, the HCV program is rationed and does not guarantee receipt based on eligibility. In most cases, local housing authorities maintain waiting lists as a mechanism to address excess demand and distribute the limited amount of vouchers. Yet, waiting lists for HCV are not always open, as local authorities often close the lists periodically to control the volume of applicants (Hembre & Urban, 2023).

Keeping track of waiting lists that open up for a short duration or at unpredictable times is likely to impose a burden on potential applicants. This may ultimately determine who applies and thus receives the voucher, as the cost of such burden is likely higher for households with limited resources. This administrative burden may further undermine other policy efforts aimed at reducing barriers to utilizing vouchers (e.g., source of income anti-discrimination laws).

To understand how the administrative practices of managing the waiting lists influence access to housing assistance programs and the distributional consequences, we explore the following research questions:
1) Do the duration and predictability of waiting list openings vary across local housing authorities?
2) Is variation in duration and predictability of waiting list openings associated with differential access to the HCV program by race/ethnicity, income levels, number of children, and age?
3) Does the duration and predictability of waiting list opening moderate the effectiveness of source of income anti-discrimination laws in improving access to the HCV program for socioeconomically disadvantaged households?

We use longitudinal local housing authority level data and find much variation in duration and inconsistency of waiting list accessibility. For example, among 1,154 PHAs, 543 were always open, 533 opened intermittently, and 78 never opened over a seven-year period. Local housing authorities with more uncertainty in waiting list openings tend to have fewer Black and female-headed households with children. We plan to employ a dynamic compositional framework and two-way fixed effects models to explore the remaining research questions. While prior studies have shown that administrative burden reduces take-up among eligible applicants, our study shifts the attention to rationed programs, a much-underexplored area in existing research but with more direct distributional consequences. When total benefits are capped, administrative burden may not reduce overall participation so much as it alters who ultimately receives assistance.

Authors

• Jeehee Han, Texas A&M University
  Presenting Author

• Jonghoon Lee, Texas A&M University
  Presenting Author