Research

Working papers

The Impact of Social Networks on Housing Voucher Search Outcomes

The Housing Choice Voucher program is the largest federal rental assistance program, assisting more than 2.5 million households each year. However, the program persistently struggles with low lease-up rates. Earlier research shows that only 60% of those issued a voucher are able to use the voucher, due to the difficulty of searching for and securing housing on the private rental market. This paper focuses on an understudied driver of lease-up: social networks. Social networks can often influence program take-up, and are known to be a pivotal force in the housing search for low-income households. This study exploits the fact that the timing of voucher issuance and location where recipients live when they receive vouchers are jointly random to quantify the impact of social networks on lease up and search time through an instrumental variables strategy. I use administrative data to measure lease-up, and data from Facebook that measure social connectedness at the ZIP Code level to quantify social connectivity within metro areas. Stronger social connections to greater numbers of households that have recently received search vouchers or successfully leased up into the program have a small but positive, significant impact on the probability of leasing up. When considering the effect of connections to voucher recipients of the same race, effects are positive for 6 of the 7 sample metros, though effect sizes are similar to the aggregate measures. In general, race-specific effects are stronger for non-white voucher recipients. There is suggestive evidence of congestion effects in the search process, as search times increase with the number of search vouchers issued. These countervailing forces are important for housing authorities to consider when attempting to boost lease-up rates.

Does Opportunity Come with Trade-Offs? The Impact of Small Area Fair Market Rents on Search Outcomes. with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan.

While housing choice vouchers reduce the risk of homelessness, lower cost burdens and alleviate crowding, the program has been less successful in helping low-income households move to economically diverse neighborhoods.  More fundamentally, about two in five households who receive vouchers are not able to use them at all, due to the difficulty of finding and leasing a unit on the private market in any neighborhood (Ellen et al, 2023).  Few have considered whether policies designed to address one of these shortcomings (the limited set of neighborhoods reached by voucher holders) can undermine progress on the other key weakness of the program (the large share of voucher recipients who fail to successfully use them).  We examine such potential trade-offs in the context of the switch from setting rent ceilings at the level of the metropolitan area to setting them at the ZIP Code level rather than the metropolitan area (Small Area Fair Market Rents, or SAFMRs). In brief, we find that SAFMRs helped new voucher holders lease up in neighborhoods with higher rents and lower poverty rates than their origin neighborhoods.  At the same time, we find no evidence that the adoption of SAFMRs affected lease up rates of new recipients of vouchers within three years of implementation. Even for voucher holders originating in low-rent neighborhoods, where the pool of eligible units likely shrank, or receiving vouchers from PHAs disproportionately serving such neighborhoods, we see no decline in lease up rates relative to the comparison group. 

Publications

Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Katherine O'Regan, and Sarah Strochak. (2023). Race, Space, and Take Up: Explaining Housing Voucher Lease-Up Rates. Journal of Housing Economics, forthcoming.

Media coverage: New York Times

Works in progress

The Impact of Source of Income Laws on Voucher Lease Up. with Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O’Regan and Katharine Harwood.

Technical reports

Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Katherine O'Regan, and Sarah Strochak. (2023). Using HUD Administrative Data to Estimate Success Rates and Search Durations for New Voucher Recipients. Technical report, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Policy research and reports (selected)

Neal, Micheal, Sarah Strochak, Linna Zhu, and Caitlin Young. (2020). How Automated Valuation Models Can Disproportionately Affect Majority-Black Neighborhoods. Urban Institute, Washington, DC.

Strochak, Sarah, Aaron Shroyer, Jung Hyun Choi, Kathryn Reynolds, and Laurie Goodman. (2020). How Much Assistance Is Needed to Support Renters through the COVID-19 Crisis? Urban Institute, Washington, DC.

Greene, Solomon, Laurie Goodman, Sarah Strochak, Dan Teles, and Patrick Spauster. (2020). Housing and Land Use Implications of Split-Roll Property Tax Reform in California. Urban Institute, Washington, DC.