Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

Abstract

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Landlords and Access to Opportunity

“…However, since most voucher tenants do not move in our two-year time frame, the stock of vouchers remains concentrated in low-rent neighborhoods. Our results are qualitatively similar to those from Dallas (Collinson and Ganong, 2018) and Seattle's Family Access Supplement (Bergman et al, 2019), despite differences in context. 2 Our fifth and sixth facts characterize marginal opportunity landlords.…”

“…This is small relative to the entire stock of 11,612 vouchers in DC in 2017. On the other hand, 300 households per year is similar to the CMTO experiment in which just over 200 new voucher families received treatment, of whom 40 percent were induced into opportunity moves(Bergman et al, 2019). Similarly, the Baltimore RegionalHousing Partnership has existed for about 15 years and currently serves about 4,000 families, which yields 267 families per year.…”

“…However, landlord behavior could also prevent voucher tenants from accessing opportunity neighborhoods. While there is some evidence that people can move to opportunity through intensive mobility counseling programs (DeLuca and Rosenblatt, 2017;Bergman et al, 2019), a randomized control trial testing counseling and incentives in Chicago did not increase the rate of opportunity moves, and the authors concluded that a lack of willing landlords limited many families who wanted to move (Schwartz et al, 2017). A growing qualitative literature documents that, 6 rather than passively accepting any tenant who can pay, landlords respond actively and strategically to the voucher program (Popkin and Cunningham, 2000;Rosen, 2014;Greenlee, 2014;Desmond, 2016;Garboden et al, 2018).…”

“…More positively, paying landlords higher rent in expensive neighborhoods can encourage opportunity moves (Collinson and Ganong, 2018). Perhaps most promising, a combined intervention of paying higher rent, intensive counseling for tenants, flexible support for landlords, and short-term financial assistance showed success in Baltimore (DeLuca and Rosenblatt, 2017) and King County, WA (Bergman et al, 2019). In King County, the combined mobility intervention increased opportunity moves by 40 percentage points relative to a randomly selected control group only able to access increased rent payments.…”

“…Similarly, paying greater rent in expensive neighborhoods can facilitate some voucher moves (Collinson et al, 2015) because some landlords are on the margin between accepting and rejecting a voucher tenant. However, if most landlords do not respond to increased payments alone, then a combined package of services that includes high-touch landlord outreach can be more effective (Bergman et al, 2019).…”