Housing Assistance and Neighborhood Quality Among Low-Income Families

Background

The public housing and Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) programs provide rental assistance to five million households in the United States and have important implications for the types of neighborhoods to which families have access. Prior research suggests that families receiving vouchers live in neighborhoods that are similar to those of low income families who do not receive assistance, while families in public housing may live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and minority concentrations. Research has documented the importance of neighborhoods for a numerous domains of children’s well-being, including cognitive skills, academic achievement, and economic mobility.

This paper uses longitudinal data to examine the quality of neighborhoods to which families receiving different types of housing assistance have access and whether neighborhood quality differs depending on housing assistance receipt.

 

Methods

This project utilizes the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a large, nationally representative panel survey of households in the United States. In addition to the detailed longitudinal data available in the PSID core, the PSID’s restricted-use Assisted Housing Database matches standardized addresses for each family unit through 2009 to records of assisted housing to verify housing assistance receipt. Neighborhood characteristics are drawn from the Longitudinal Tract Database.

The study sample is limited to low-income, renter families with children born between 1970 and 1992 for a total of 1,734 individuals with 14,186 observations. Families are categorized as low-income if their average income from birth to age 15 is at or below 200% of the federal poverty threshold. Housing assistance receipt at each wave is coded categorically (no assistance; public housing; voucher; other assistance). Census-tract level neighborhood characteristics (percentages of the population who were in poverty or were minority) are measured as continuous variables at each of these waves.

The effects of housing assistance receipt on neighborhood disadvantage are explored, taking advantage of the panel nature of these data, and controlling for a comprehensive set of covariates. Housing assistance is lagged by two years to ensure correct temporal ordering. Associations of housing assistance type and neighborhood disadvantage are estimated using pooled cross-sections of the data, adjusting standard errors for clustering at the individual level. Individual fixed effects models are incorporated to address unobserved differences between those with and without housing assistance.

Results

Results from both pooled cross-sectional and fixed effects models indicate that children living in public housing live in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates than low-income children without housing assistance. While pooled cross-sectional models also reveal that children living in public housing experience neighborhoods with more minority concentration than other low-income children, fixed effects models suggest that minority concentration in neighborhoods in which children living in public housing reside does not differ from the neighborhoods in which they lived without housing assistance. There are no significant effects for voucher holders for either of these outcomes.

Conclusion

These findings would suggest that the voucher program be strengthened to provide families with assistance to access more advantaged neighborhoods and that neighborhood-level improvements be made around public housing.