Cash Is King? RCT on Impact of Voucher and Cash-Based Rental Assistance on Housing Outcomes

• In Event: Preventing Future and Subsequent Homelessness

Abstract

Housing assistance programs protect many households from housing insecurity, but many households offered a Housing Choice Voucher, the largest U.S. rental assistance program, are unable to use it. This paper presents findings from the evaluation of PHLHousing+, a direct-to-tenant, cash rental assistance program that began in Fall 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The program provides monthly cash payments to 301 low-income families with children over nearly five years, ending in June 2027. Much like the in-kind rental subsidy provided by the national Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, administered locally by the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), PHLHousing+ payments are designed to eliminate housing cost burden by ensuring that households pay no more than 30% of their income on housing. However, unlike traditional housing vouchers in which a household must find a willing landlord who receives payments from the housing authority, PHLHousing+ offers the rental assistance payments directly to the household with no restrictions on how it is spent.

PHLHousing+ is administered by the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation (PHDC), a quasi- public nonprofit agency operating under the umbrella of the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Planning and Development. The PHLHousing+ evaluation was designed as a randomized control trial with three assignment groups: (1) “cash households” who received the rental subsidy in the form of monthly cash payments; (2) “voucher households” who were offered a tenant-based housing voucher; and (3) “control households” who remained on Philadelphia Housing Authority waitlists and received no rental subsidy.

We find households offered cash had a 100% subsidy use rate compared to only 73% of households offered a voucher. Relative to control households receiving no rental subsidy, cash and voucher households had significantly lower rates for most but not all measures of housing instability and poor housing quality. Direct comparisons between the cash and voucher groups show few statistically significant differences between the two forms of assistance. These findings suggest a cash rental subsidy is a valuable tool to support low-income renters.

Authors

• Vincent J. Reina, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Julia Honoroff, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author