Rental Housing Assistance for the 21st Century

Current rental housing assistance programs are not designed to provide a safety net for people whose lives are volatile, or to encourage poor people to live in good locations. These failings can be corrected. HUD should establish a program of rental insurance-like mortgage insurance, but for renters. Low income housing assistance formulas should be revised to reward good neighborhood features, and punish bad

Rent Vouchers and the Price of Low-Income Housing

Since the early 1980s, low-income housing subsidies have increasingly shifted towards vouchers which allow recipients to rent in the private market. By 1993, vouchers subsidized as many households as lived in traditional housing projects, although most low-income households did not receive any subsidies. This study investigates whether this policy has raised rents for unsubsidized poor households, as many analysts predicted when the program was conceived. The main finding is that low-income households in metropolitan areas with more vouchers have experienced faster rent increases than those where vouchers are less abundant. In the 90 biggest metropolitan areas, vouchers have raised rents by 16 percent on average, a large effect consistent with a low supply elasticity in the low quality rental housing market. Considered as a transfer program, this result implies that vouchers have caused a $8.2 billion increase in the total rent paid by low-income non-recipients, while only providing a subsidy of$5.8 billion to recipients, resulting in a net loss of $2.4 billion to low-income households

Longitudinal Outcomes of Subsidized Housing Recipients in Matched Survey and Administrative Data

This study uses a new dataset combining survey and administrative data to investigate the longitudinal effects of subsidized housing on a broad range of outcomes relating to dependency. Given a household's assistance status in 1996, it examines outcomes over the subsequent three years. The aim is to produce an excellent comparison group by matching on the same variables (measured in an earlier period) as the outcomes to be examined. The main findings are that housing subsidy programs reduce individual earnings by roughly 15% and household size by 5-10%. Although these programs are found to affect neighborhood choice, neighborhood poverty rates explain little of the impact on individual earnings