Choice and Mobility in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: Review of Research Findings and Considerations for Policymakers

Summary

As is evidenced by the name of the program, “choice” is one of the key components of the nation’s largest federal housing assistance program, the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV, or voucher) program. The choice aspect of the program—that eligible families can use their federal subsidies to rent the housing they choose in the private market—differentiates it from the other major federal housing assistance programs, including public housing and project-based Section 8 rental assistance, which offer assistance tied to specific units of housing. Those programs have long been criticized for isolating and concentrating poor families, particularly minority families, in high-poverty communities with limited opportunities, particularly in urban areas. Thus, the HCV program was designed, in part, to promote “mobility,” or make more areas accessible to low-income families and encourage them to move to areas with greater opportunities. Further, courts have directed communities to use vouchers as a remedy for racial segregation in public housing.

Despite these goals, most families participating in the Section 8 HCV program live in racially segregated communities that have medium or high levels of poverty. There is little consensus on why this occurs, as the housing choice a family makes may reflect the many constraints a family faces in using its voucher, the understanding the family has of the choices to be made, and/or the family’s own preferences.

A number of demonstrations and studies have looked at how vouchers can be used to deconcentrate poverty and the effects of moving families out of areas of concentrated poverty. Taken together, the research to-date has not shown convincing evidence that programs designed to move low-income families to neighborhoods with low-poverty and racially/ethnically integrated neighborhoods have resulted in families successfully and permanently moving to such communities. Most studies have shown that families given vouchers with mobility goals have struggled to make initial moves to areas that would be considered “areas of opportunity” (i.e., those with very low concentrations of poverty). Further, those families that did initially relocate to low-poverty and more racially integrated neighborhoods, over time and with subsequent moves, often ended up living in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of poverty and less racial integration than the low-poverty neighborhoods to which they had initially moved.

Researchers have also looked beyond families’ locational outcomes at the effects of moving on various measures of family well-being. While one of the motivating goals behind these mobility policies and demonstrations has been to improve families’ economic well-being and their children’s educational outcomes, studies have not found evidence that the tested mobility policies have had major positive impacts in these areas. Early studies found some initial employment and earnings impacts and some mixed findings regarding children’s outcomes, although later research has called those initial findings into question. Some positive impacts were found in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration involving physical and mental health, housing satisfaction, neighborhood satisfaction, perceived safety, and overall perceived well-being. But in other areas of interest to policymakers, such as family economic well-being—employment and children’s educational outcomes—no impacts were found from MTO.

The fact that many families with vouchers continue to live in high or medium-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods, paired with the research findings to-date about the limited impacts of tested mobility programs, leads to several questions and considerations policymakers may choose to explore. One question is whether policy changes to the voucher program, or to other federal assisted housing programs, could help to better achieve the goals of poverty deconcentration and reducing racial or ethnic segregation. Another question is whether these goals are of the same, greater, or less importance than other program goals, such as promoting affordability and housing stability. The way policymakers choose to answer these questions could have implications for the direction of federal housing policy.

These questions are particularly relevant now for several reasons. One reason is the current fiscal climate. In a constrained budget environment, policymakers face difficult tradeoffs in funding federal programs. In determining priorities for limited federal funding, the effectiveness and efficiency of all federal housing assistance programs, including the largest—the HCV program—may be reexamined. In fact, reforms to the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program have been considered every year for at least the last decade. While the choice and mobility aspects of the program have not been a primary driver of those reform efforts, these aspects of the program may receive more attention, especially given recently-released research findings. The results of the final evaluation of the MTO demonstration have only been published in the last couple of years and are being considered and debated by social science researchers as well as housing policy advocates.

This report explores the concept of choice and mobility in federal housing policy, particularly in the Section 8 HCV program. It begins by describing the origins of choice and mobility in federal housing policy, followed by a discussion of choice and mobility in today’s Section 8 HCV program. The report then provides an overview of relevant research on the effects of choice and mobility policies. It concludes with a discussion of options and considerations for policymakers.