Housing Assistance and Household Food Security
Housing assistance programs are the primary response to housing hardships among the poor; however, they may also have a direct impact on household food security. There is a small body of research that examines the effect of public housing on health, healthcare utilization and child nutrition outcomes; however, household food security has not been considered. Housing assistance programs provide substantial but (scarce) subsidies to poor renters that alter the economic circumstances of low-income households and may reduce household food insecurity. For instance, housing assistance might free up resources for food purchase and provide income stability, which has been linked to lower food insecurity in previous research. The central aim of this study is to investigate the association between housing assistance programs and food insecurity among a sample of low-income families.
Methods
We use data from the Hunger in America 2010 Study, a national survey of nearly 60,000 people receiving emergency food assistance. Because the HIA sample is primarily low income (average annual household income was $12,400), it presents a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of housing assistance in a sample where the overwhelming majority of households are eligible for such benefits, but only a minority (approximately 14%) report receiving them. We restrict our analyses to low income households (<185% of the federal poverty line) who are renting in order to assess the impact of housing assistance receipt among a sample most likely to receive benefits. We measure housing assistance receipt based on a question asked of HIA respondents: "Does your household receive Section 8 or Public Housing Assistance" and assess both low and very low food security using a standard 6-item measure developed by the United States Department of Agriculture. We run multivariate analyses controlling for socio-demographic factors, participation in other nutrition programs, and zip code of residence. We cluster standard errors to account for the non-independence of respondent observations.
Results
In linear probability models, we find that housing assistance receipt is associated with significant decreases of 0.027 and 0.044 in the probabilities of low food security and very low food security, respectively. These results are robust to the inclusion of indicators for missing data for covariates. In supplementary analyses, we find that the association between housing assistance receipt and low food security is no longer significant after controlling for whether families were late in paying last month's rent, suggesting that housing assistance might affect food insecurity by improving households' ability to manage rent and other expenses.
Implications
This study is the first to investigate the relationship between housing assistance receipt and household food insecurity. We find evidence that housing assistance is associated with reductions in the probability of both low and very low food security among a sample of low income households. The latter finding is particularly noteworthy as few factors have been consistently linked with very low food security in previous research. Our results suggest that policy makers might turn to expansions in housing assistance programs as a means to combat food insecurity.