Effective Source of Income Anti-Discrimination Policies

• In Event: Lightning Session: Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy

Abstract

Increasingly, housing scholars and advocates call on local jurisdictions to pass Source of Income anti-Discrimination (SOI) policies, which would limit landlords’ ability to legally discriminate against tenants who hold Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV). As the most common form of housing assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and one that relies on the private market to provide housing, understanding how to increase the success of the HCV program is paramount. While some evidence exists that supports the effectiveness of SOI laws (see Freeman, 2012; Hangen & O’Brien, 2023; Mackay, 2021), there is opportunity to explore if the variation in these policies’ designs influence poverty concentration—the original goal of the program (Metzger, 2014). Often, SOI policies are designed with enforcement mechanisms, where individuals are given the right to sue a landlord for discrimination, the opportunity to file an administrative complaint, or both. These choices in policy design could impact the effectiveness of SOI policies. To estimate the extent to which SOI policies and their design influence poverty concentration, I relied on the Urban Institute’s dataset on SOI policies as well as census data. From here, I used coarsened exact matching to create a comparable treatment and control group and fit fractional logit models. Results reveal that SOI policies are associated with negligible decreases in neighborhood-level poverty concentration, controlling for other factors. In this, administrative enforcement mechanisms are associated with greater reductions in poverty concentration compared to court enforcement, but this is only seen in older SOI policies, suggesting that the policy’s age is an important factor. These findings suggest that the endurance of poverty, challenges of regulating landlords, and limitations of a single policy in addressing these issues create significant barriers in the successfully effects of SOI policies. As the rise of housing unaffordability demands federal solutions, this paper contributes to the burgeoning research on the HCV program and subsequently housing policy at large.

Author

• Noelle Broughton, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author