Session: Examining the Value of Housing Assistance for Youth and Families (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Background: Housing assistance is a critical resource for millions of families. This assistance impacts families' safety, stability, and access to neighborhoods. Given accumulating rigorous evidence that safe, stable, high-quality housing can improve educational and labor market outcomes for families receiving housing assistance, additional research on maximizing the potential of housing assistance to achieve equal opportunity is a valuable line of inquiry. To address these issues, this symposium brings together three papers that address important research questions among housing assistance scholars, including the effectiveness of public housing versus housing vouchers in achieving stability, how housing assistance recipients define and seek out high-quality neighborhoods, and the extent to which neighborhood quality impacts youth residing in public housing. This symposium also includes a discussant who has written extensively about the value of housing assistance for families.

Methods: These papers utilize a variety of data sources, including administrative data, surveys, and qualitative interviews, at both the national and local levels. One paper uses a nationally representative panel data set, while the other two papers use a mix of administrative and survey data from the Denver and Baltimore regions. These papers use a variety of analytic approaches, including both quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Findings: The first paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate whether housing different types of housing assistance increase residential stability. The author finds that living in public housing increases residential stability relative to unassisted families and that residential stability associated with receiving a voucher does not differ from the residential stability of unassisted families. The second paper, using administrative data and field interviews in Baltimore, finds that most families receiving a housing voucher through a mobility opportunity program remained in low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods, though many continued to struggle with issues around housing and neighborhood quality as well as landlord conflicts. The third paper examines predictors of violence exposure among youth living in Denver public housing. The author finds that residence in neighborhoods with high property crime most strongly predicted victimization or witnessing neighborhood violence, and living in neighborhoods with low violent crime and high proportions of foreign-born residents significantly decreased victimization risk.

Implications: Collectively, findings from these papers emphasize that both public housing and housing vouchers can assist families in achieving stability, but both programs face ongoing challenges. Public housing residence does increase family residential stability, an important finding given previous research linking residential stability with important child well-being outcomes, yet, the value of stability may be reduced if public housing units stabilize families in neighborhoods with high levels of crime that increase youth exposure to crime. While vouchers typically provide access to neighborhoods of better quality than public housing, findings from the second paper illustrate that families can access higher-quality neighborhoods though they often continue to struggle with finding safe, quality units. Understanding the complexities of the ways in which housing assistance operates is important for researchers and policymakers to most effectively foster family well-being and economic success.