Promoting Homeownership Among Low-Income Households

Argues that the current system of low-income housing assistance is strongly biased against homeownership. Examines the performance of past housing programs and implications for the future design of efficient low-income homeownership programs

The Effect on Program Participation of Replacing Current Low-Income Housing Programs with an Entitlement Housing Voucher Program

This paper estimates the effect on participation rates of families of various types of replacing HUD’s largest low-income housing programs with alternative tenure-neutral entitlement housing voucher programs that differ in their taxpayer cost and the relative generosity of the subsidy to households of different types. The estimates of participation in the entitlement programs are based primarily on the five-percent household sample from the 2000 Decennial Census and participation experience in the only entitlement housing assistance programs that have been operated in the United States. HUD’s administrative records provide data on current recipients of low-income housing assistance. The paper explores the sensitivity of the results to the equations used to predict participation. The results indicate that even the entitlement housing voucher program that costs 10 percent less than the current system would serve 50 percent more households in total and many more of each type – white, black, and Hispanic; elderly and nonelderly; families living in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas; small, medium, and large families; and households in the first two real income deciles.Low-income housing assistance, housing vouchers, welfare reform two-sided markets, junk mail, email, telemarketing, Do Not Call List, message pricing, the Medium is the Message, market research. Classification-H53, I38, R00

Subsidized Housing, Emergency Shelters, and Homelessness: An Empirical Investigation Using Data from the 1990 Census

This paper uses data on the only systematic count of the homeless throughout the United States to estimate the effect on the rate of homelessness of a wide variety of potentially important determinants, including several major policy responses to homelessness that have not been included in previous studies. It improves upon estimates of the effect of previously studied determinants by using measures that correspond more closely to underlying theoretical constructs, especially by accounting for geographical price differences. It also conducts numerous sensitivity analyses and analyzes the consequences of the undercount of the homeless for point estimates and hypothesis tests. The paper's most important finding from a policy perspective is that targeting the current budget authority for housing assistance on the poorest eligible households will essentially eliminate homelessness among those who apply for assistance. Achieving this goal without concentrating the poorest households in housing projects and without spending more money requires vouchering out project-based assistance. The primary methodological finding of the paper is that the 1990 Decennial Census did not produce sufficiently accurate counts, especially of the street homeless, to permit very precise estimates of the effects of many factors which surely affect the rate of homelessness. The main exceptions are the price of housing and average March temperature. Plausible models of the undercount imply that in regressions with a rate of homelessness as the dependent variable estimators of the coefficients of explanatory variables will be biased towards zero. In regressions with the logarithm of a rate of homelessness as the dependent variable, only the estimator of the constant term will be biased downwards. The unknown magnitude of the undercount precludes predicting the effects of policy interventions on the number of homeless based on the results in this paper and previous studies.Homelessness

Housing Programs for Low-Income Households

The primary purposes of this paper are to (1) consider the justifications that have been offered for housing subsidies to low-income households and the implications of these justifications for the evaluation and design of housing programs, (2) describe the most important features of the largest rental housing programs for low-income households in the United States, (3) summarize the empirical evidence on the major effects of these programs, and (4) analyze the major options for reform of the system of housing subsidies. The largest rental programs are HUD's Public Housing, Section 236, Section 8 New Construction/Substantial Rehab, Section 8 Existing, USDA's Section 515, and the IRS's Low Income Housing Tax Credit. The effects of these programs that will be considered include effects on the housing occupied by recipients of the subsidy and their consumption of other goods, effects on labor supply of assisted households, the distribution of benefits among recipients, participation rates among different types of households, effects on the types of neighborhoods in which subsidized households live and the effect of subsidized housing and households on their neighbors, the effect on prices of unsubsidized housing, and the cost-effectiveness of alternative methods for delivering housing assistance.

The Cost-Effectiveness of Alternative Methods of Delivering Housing Subsidies

The empirical literature is unanimous in finding that tenant-based housing certificates and vouchers provide housing of any quality at a much lower total cost (that is, cost to all levels of government and tenants) than the types of project-based assistance studied, namely Public Housing, Section 236, and Section 8 New Construction and Substantial Rehab. However, these studies are so old and inaccessible that they are unknown to most people involved in current discussions of housing policy. This paper discusses the theoretical reasons to expect that these types of project-based housing programs will have excessive costs, presents a conceptually correct methodology for the cost-effectiveness analysis of housing programs, and provides a description and critical appraisal of the data and methods used in these earlier studies as well as a summary of their results. It concludes that cost-effectiveness analyses of current forms of projectbased housing assistance should be the highest priority for research on housing policy.Housing assistance, housing programs, housing subsidies, cost-effectiveness