Housing Assistance and Residential Stability Among Low-Income Families

Background

More than eight million households in the US spend over half their household income on housing. Housing assistance can provide crucial relief by limiting families’ housing costs to a third of their income. It can also help low-income families attain residential stability by providing them with protection against financial shocks to which they are particularly vulnerable. Residential stability is important for a wide range of family and child factors including parental job stability and, for children, performance at school, engagement in violence, and health. This study explores the effects of housing assistance receipt on the residential stability of families with children from the child’s birth through age 15 and examines differences in this relationship by housing assistance type.

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 has matched standardized addresses for each family unit from 1968 through 2009 to records of assisted housing to verify housing assistance receipt.

The study sample is limited to low-income, renter families with children born between 1970 and 1992 for a total of 1,834 individuals with 16,463 observations. To account for income fluctuation over time, families are categorized as low-income if their average income over this period 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). Residential stability is measured across the same period and coded as moved or did not move since the last wave.

The effects of housing assistance receipt on stability are explored, taking advantage of the panel nature of these data, and controlling for a comprehensive set of covariates at the individual, family, household, and Census tract levels that may confound this relationship. In all models, housing assistance receipt is lagged by two years to address potential reverse causality. Associations of housing assistance type and stability are estimated using pooled cross-sections of the data and adjusting standard errors for clustering at the individual level. Next, individual fixed effects models, which identify effects within individuals over time, are incorporated to address unobserved differences between those with and without housing assistance.

Results

About 34% of families received housing assistance between a child’s birth and age fifteen. Fully controlled fixed effects models show that living in public housing increases residential stability, but find no effect for receiving a voucher compared to receiving no housing assistance. The predicted probability of moving in any given wave for those living in public housing is 24% compared to 30% for those with no housing assistance and 31% for those with a voucher.

Conclusion

This study finds that children in families living in public housing experience more residential stability which may contribute to better outcomes in academic achievement, health, and behavior for low-income children. These results can help policymakers make better informed decisions about housing assistance policies.