Participation Costs, Search Time, and Match Quality in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. (Job market paper)
Many social safety net programs struggle with incomplete program take-up, oftentimes due to high participation costs. The Housing Choice Voucher Program involves a complex, multi-step take-up process and coordination with the private rental market, creating considerable barriers to entry for participants. Potential voucher recipients also must navigate an increasingly difficult housing search process in a limited amount of time, making it even more challenging to use their vouchers at all, and to find a home that meets their preferences. In this paper, I evaluate the effects of two unique features of the voucher program: the timing of voucher issuance, and variation in how long voucher recipients are given to search. In the aggregate, the timing of voucher issuance causes a decline in the likelihood of using a voucher within a certain time frame, and but has no effect on the chance of a participant ever using their voucher. However, housing authorities vary in their time restrictions on voucher use and their leniency in granting extensions. At housing authorities that do not offer extensions, end-of-month issuance results in a 6 percentage point decline in voucher success rates. Households at these PHAs see shorter search times, and are more likely to end up in over-crowded housing situations.
Pricing for Opportunity: The Impact of Spatially Varying Rent Subsidies on Housing Voucher Neighborhoods and Take-up. with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O'Regan. [SSRN]
The Housing Choice Voucher program serves over 2.3 million households per year. While the program provides significant benefits, most voucher holders live in high-poverty neighborhoods, and many recipients fail to use their vouchers at all. This paper evaluates a new programmatic approach for expanding and improving neighborhood outcomes, which sets voucher subsidy amounts to vary by ZIP Code rent levels, rather than being uniform across an entire metro area. We find that this pricing change increases moves to higher rent, lower poverty ZIP Codes without increasing financial costs or affecting the ability of new voucher recipients to use their vouchers. This even holds true for the recipients most at risk of experiencing a decline in their ability to use vouchers because the stock of voucher-eligible units near them likely decreases. We show that households and landlords make adjustments on other margins that moderate effects on successful take-up, including renting smaller homes, increasing out-of-service area moves, and charging lower gross rents in low-rent areas to match rent subsidies.
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.
Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Katherine O'Regan, and Sarah Strochak. (2024). Race, Space, and Take Up: Explaining Housing Voucher Lease-Up Rates. Journal of Housing Economics.
Media coverage: New York Times, USA Today
The Impact of Source of Income Laws on Housing Voucher Success Rates. with Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O’Regan and Katharine Harwood.
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.
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.