Research Shows Rental Assistance Reduces Hardship and Provides Platform to Expand Opportunity for Low-Income Families
End Notes
[1] Alison Bell and Niki Deininger contributed to the preparation of this analysis.
[2] See the body of this report for citations to research studies.
[3] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “United States Federal Rental Assistance Fact Sheet,” May 14, 2019, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/federal-rental-assistance-fact-sheets#US.
[4] Alicia Mazzara and Barbara Sard, “Chart Book: Employment and Earnings for Households Receiving Federal Rental Assistance,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 5, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/chart-book-employment-and-earnings-for-households-receiving-federal-rental.
[5] CBPP analysis of 2017 HUD administrative data and 2017 Census poverty thresholds.
[6] For an overview of federal rental assistance programs, see Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Federal Rental Assistance,” November 15, 2017, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/policy-basics-federal-rental-assistance.
[7] Alicia Mazzara, Barbara Sard, and Douglas Rice, “Rental Assistance to Families with Children at Lowest Point in Decade,” Center on Budget and Policies Priorities, October 18, 2016, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/rental-assistance-to-families-with-children-at-lowest-point-in-decade; Alicia Mazzara, “Gap Between Federal Rental Assistance and Need Is Growing,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 16, 2017, https://www.cbpp.org/blog/gap-between-federal-rental-assistance-and-need-is-growing.
[8] Andrew Aurand et al., “The Long Wait for a Home,” Housing Spotlight, Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall 2016, https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/HousingSpotlight_6-1.pdf.
[9] “United States Federal Rental Assistance Fact Sheet,” op. cit.
[10] Data are from a follow-up survey conducted four and a half to five years after random assignment. Data show the percentage of families that were homeless and without homes of their own during the 12 months preceding the survey, the percentage in overcrowded housing at the time of the survey, and the total number of moves during the period after random assignment. This study targeted families who received, had recently received, or were eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). At the start of the evaluation, 80 percent of participants were receiving TANF benefits; by the end of the study period, only about 30 percent were. By comparison, 16 percent of all voucher holders with children received TANF benefits in 2016, according to HUD data. Michelle Wood, Jennifer Turnham, and Gregory Mills, “Housing Affordability and Family Well-Being: Results from the Housing Voucher Evaluation,” Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2008; Gregory Mills et al., “Effects of Housing Vouchers on Welfare Families,” prepared for Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research, September 2006.
[11] Daniel Gubits et al., “Family Options Study: 3-Year Impacts of Housing and Services Interventions for Homeless Families,” prepared for Department of Housing and Urban Development, October 2016, https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Family-Options-Study-Full-Report.pdf.
[12] Michael S. Hurlburt, Patricia A. Wood, and Richard L. Hough, “Providing Independent Housing for the Homeless Mentally Ill: A Novel Approach to Evaluating Long-Term Housing Patterns,” Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1996.
[13] Robert Rosenheck, et al., “Cost-effectiveness of Supported Housing for Homeless Persons with Mental Illness,” Archives of General Psychiatry, September 2003; Maria J. O’Connell, Wesley Kasprow, and Robert A. Rosenheck, “Rates and Risk Factors for Homelessness After Successful Housing in a Sample of Formerly Homeless Veterans,” Psychiatric Services, Vol. 59, No. 3, March 2008.
[14] Liana Fox, “The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2018,” Current Population Reports, October 2019, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-268.pdf. This Census Bureau report estimates that another program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), lifted 526,000 seniors above the poverty line in 2018. The data used for the report underreport benefits from some government programs and therefore understate their effect on poverty. Estimates that adjust for this underreporting are not yet available for 2018, but are likely to show SSI having an impact on poverty that is closer to — and conceivably above — the impact of rental assistance.
[15] CBPP analysis of 2017 Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey data.
[16] Gubits et al., op. cit.
[17] Marybeth Shinn et al., “Long-Term Associations of Homelessness with Children’s Well-Being,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 51, No. 6, February 2008; Linda C. Berti et al., “Comparison of Health Status of Children Using a School-Based Health Center for Comprehensive Care,” Journal of Pediatric Health Care, Vol. 15, September/October 2001.
[18] Berti et al, op. cit.
[19] Stanley K. Frencher et al., “A Comparative Analysis of Serious Injury and Illness among Homeless and Housed Low Income Residents of New York City,” Trauma, Vol. 69, No. 4, October 2010.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Jelena Obradovic et al., “Academic Achievement of Homeless and Highly Mobile Children in an Urban School District,” Development and Psychopathology, 2009.
[22] Lorraine E. Maxwell, “Home and School Density Effects on Elementary School Children: The Role of Spatial Density,” Environment and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2003.
[23] Frank Braconi, “Housing and Schooling,” The Urban Prospect, Citizens Housing and Planning Council, 2001; Dalton Conley, “A Room with a View or a Room of One’s Own? Housing and Social Stratification,” Sociological Forum, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2001; Maxwell, op. cit.
[24] Maxwell, op. cit.
[25] Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest and Claire C. McKenna, “Early Childhood Housing Instability and School Readiness,” Child Development, 2013.
[26] Jack P. Shonkoff, et al., “The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress,” PEDIATRICS, Vol. 129, No. 1, 2012, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/1/e232; Nicole L. Hair et al., “Association of Child Poverty, Brain Development, and Academic Achievement,” JAMA Pediatrics, Vol. 169, No. 9, 2015; Mark M. Kishiyama et al., “Socioeconomic Disparities Affect Prefrontal Function in Children,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 21, No. 6, 2009.
[27] Gubits et al., op. cit..
[28] Ibid.
[29] David T. Burkam et al., “School Mobility in the Early Elementary Grades: Frequency and Impact from Nationally Representative Data,” prepared for workshop on Impact of Mobility and Change on the Lives of Young Children, Schools, and Neighborhoods, June 4, 2009; Arthur J. Reynolds, Chin-Chih Chen, and Janette Herbers, “School Mobility and Educational Success: A Research Synthesis and Evidence on Prevention,” prepared for workshop on Impact of Mobility and Change on the Lives of Young Children, Schools, and Neighborhoods, June 22, 2009; Janette Herbers et al., “School Mobility and Developmental Outcomes in Young Adulthood,” Development and Psychopathology, Vol. 25, 2013.
[30] David Kerbow, “Patterns of Urban Student Mobility and Local School Reform: Technical Report,” Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk, October 1996.
[31] Stephen W. Raudenbush, Marshall Jean, and Emily Art, “Year-by-Year and Cumulative Impacts of Attending a High-Mobility Elementary School on Children's Mathematics Achievement in Chicago, 1995 to 2005,” in Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances, Russell Sage Foundation and Spencer Foundation, 2011; Eric A. Hanushek et al., “Disruption versus Tiebout Improvement: the Costs and Benefits of Switching Schools,” Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 88, 2004.
[32] Amy Schwartz et al., “Do Housing Vouchers Improve Academic Performance? Evidence from New York City,” paper presented at Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2017; Brian A. Jacob, Max Kapustin, and Jens Ludwig, “The Impact of Housing Assistance on Child Outcomes: Evidence From a Randomized Housing Lottery,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015; Deven Carlson et al., “The Effect of Housing Assistance on Student Achievement: Evidence from Wisconsin,” Journal of Housing Economics, 2019. The Schwartz et al. study found an overall improvement in educational achievement among children in voucher households; the Jacob et al. study found improvement only for boys who were under age 6 when their family entered a lottery to receive a voucher; and the Carlson et al. study found improvement only for Black children in voucher households.
[33] Fredrik Andersson et al., “Childhood Housing and Adult Earnings: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing,” National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2018. A different study found inconsistent effects on crime committed by people who had lived as children in families issued vouchers in Chicago, measured in terms of the social costs created by that crime: those costs rose modestly among girls and fell by larger but statistically insignificant amounts among boys. The study uses an experimental design and has a large sample size, making its findings highly reliable for the population studied, but it only assesses families issued vouchers in 1997-98 and 2000-03 in Chicago. Chicago had a far greater degree of racial segregation and a far higher share of vouchers concentrated in high-poverty areas than was (or is) typical nationally. Moreover, Chicago was then undertaking the largest transformation of public housing in the nation; many public housing residents were displaced, issued vouchers, and placed in competition with other voucher holders for apartments, which may have made it harder for families to use their vouchers in stable, well-located housing of adequate quality. These conditions may have muted vouchers’ positive effects. It thus is unclear whether the study’s findings can be generalized to voucher holders in other places and times. Jacob, Kapustin, and Ludwig 2015, op. cit.
[34] Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” American Economic Review, April 2016, pp. 855-902. (This study was first released in 2015, see http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/images/mto_paper.pdf.)
[35] Heather Schwartz, “Housing policy is school policy: Economically integrative housing promotes academic success in Montgomery County, Maryland,” in R.D. Kahlenberg, ed., The Future of School Integration, Century Foundation, 2012.
[36] Alicia Mazzara and Brian Knudsen, “Where Families with Children Use Housing Vouchers,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Poverty & Race Research Action Council, January 3, 2019, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/where-families-with-children-use-housing-vouchers.
[37] Among households with children in the voucher program, 58 percent have household heads who are non-Hispanic Black and 17 percent have household heads who are Hispanic. Barbara Sard et al., “Federal Policy Changes Can Help More Families with Housing Vouchers Live in Higher-Opportunity Areas,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, September 4, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/federal-policy-changes-can-help-more-families-with-housing-vouchers-live-in-higher.
[38] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright, 2017.
[39] Overall, poor children with vouchers are only modestly more likely than poor children overall to live in low-poverty neighborhoods. This is because poor white and Asian children with vouchers are somewhat less likely to live in low-poverty neighborhoods than poor white and Asian children overall, offsetting the trend among other racial and ethnic groups. Sard et al., op cit..
[40] Gubits et al., op. cit.; Daniel Gubits et al., “Family Options Study: Short-Term Impacts of Housing and Services Interventions for Homeless Families,” prepared for Department of Housing and Urban Development, July 2015, http://www.huduser.org/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/FamilyOptionsStudy_final.pdf.
[41] Jeffrey R. Kling et al., “Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects,” Econometrica, January 2007; Lisa Sanbonmatsu et al., “Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Final Impacts Evaluation,” prepared for Department of Housing and Urban Development, November 2011, https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/pdf/MTOFHD_fullreport_v2.pdf.
[42] For a fuller discussion of the research evidence about supportive housing, see Ehren Dohler et al., “Supportive Housing Helps Vulnerable People Live and Thrive in the Community,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 31, 2016, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/supportive-housing-helps-vulnerable-people-live-and-thrive-in-the-community.
[43] Anirban Basu et al., “Comparative Cost Analysis of Housing and Case Management Program for Chronically Ill Homeless Adults Compared to Usual Care,” Health Services Research, Vol. 47, No. 1, February 2012.
[44] For further discussion of the research on the health and cost outcomes associated with supportive housing, see Dohler et al., op. cit.
[45] Sandra K. Schwarcz et al., “Impact of housing on the survival of persons with AIDS,” BMC Public Health, July 2009, http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-9-220.
[46] David Buchanan et al., “The Health Impact of Supportive Housing for HIV-Positive Homeless Patients: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 99, No. S3, November 2009.
[47] Martha Burt, Carol Wilkins, and Danna Mauch, “Medicaid and Permanent Supportive Housing for Chronically Homeless Individuals: Literature Synthesis and Environmental Scan,” Office of Disability, Aging and Long-Term Care Policy, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 6, 2011, https://aspe.hhs.gov/pdf-report/medicaid-and-permanent-supportive-housing-chronically-homeless-literature-synthesis-and-environmental-scan; Sarah B. Hunter et al., Evaluation of Housing for Health Permanent Supportive Housing Program, RAND Corporation, 2017, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1694.html; Sam Tsemberis, Leyla Gulcur, and Maria Nakae, “Housing First, Consumer Choice, and Harm Reduction for Homeless Individuals With a Dual Diagnosis,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 94, No. 4, April 2004; An-Lin Cheng et al., “Impact of Supported Housing on Clinical Outcomes Analysis of a Randomized Trial Using Multiple Imputation Technique,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 195, No. 1, January 2007. Getting an accurate picture of substance use, especially among the groups without supportive housing, is extremely difficult for a number of reasons, especially the unreliability of self-reports of drug use and low response rates to follow-up among those without supportive housing. The Cheng et al. study, which found reductions in substance use, is the only one that specifically adjusted for these differential follow-up rates.
[48] This figure includes renter households with incomes below 80 percent of the local median who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing or live in overcrowded or substandard homes. Data are from a HUD custom tabulation of the 2017 American Housing Survey.
[49] Bipartisan Policy Center, “Housing America’s Future: New Directions for National Policy,” February 2013, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/housing-americas-future-new-directions-national-policy/.
[50] Will Fischer, Barbara Sard, and Alicia Mazzara, “Renters’ Credit Would Help Low-Wage Workers, Seniors, and People with Disabilities Afford Housing,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 9, 2017, https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/renters-credit-would-help-low-wage-workers-seniors-and-people-with-disabilities.
[51] Mazzara and Knudsen, op. cit.
[52] The study defined high-opportunity neighborhoods as those where children have historically experienced high rates of upward income mobility. Peter Bergman et al., “Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice,” National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w26164.
[53] Alison Bell, “HUD Funding Bill Will Launch Housing Voucher Mobility Demonstration,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 15, 2019, https://www.cbpp.org/blog/hud-funding-bill-will-launch-housing-voucher-mobility-demonstration.
[54] Barbara Sard, Mary K. Cunningham, and Robert Greenstein, “Helping Young Children Move out of Poverty by Creating a New Type of Rental Voucher,” U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, February 2018, https://www.mobilitypartnership.org/helping-young-children-move-out-poverty-creating-new-type-rental-voucher.