How Do Changes in Housing Voucher Design Affect Rent and Neighborhood Quality?

Collinson, Robert; Ganong, Peter

doi:10.1257/pol.20150176

Cited by 53 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Relative to historical norms, newly moving voucher tenants tend to move into higher-rent neighborhoods in Northwest DC rather than cheaper neighborhoods in Southeast and Northeast DC. Similar to the results of Collinson and Ganong (2018) for Dallas, we find that paying more in high-rent neighborhoods can facilitate moves to opportunity. Similar to efforts in other cities, DC's expansion of neighborhood-based voucher payments shows promise for encouraging moves to opportunity in the short run, allowing our investigation to shed light on how landlords respond to such a change.…”

Section: Small Area Fair Market Rents In Washington DCsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…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).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Landlords and Access to Opportunity

Aliprantis

Martin

Phillips

2019

Working Paper (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland)

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Despite being eligible for use in any neighborhood, housing choice vouchers tend to be redeemed in low-opportunity neighborhoods. This paper investigates how landlords contribute to this outcome and how they respond to efforts to change it. We leverage a policy change in Washington, DC, that increased voucher rental payments only in high-rent neighborhoods. Using two waves of a correspondence experiment that bracket the policy change, we show that most opportunity landlords screen out prospective voucher tenants, and we detect no change in average screening behavior after a $450 per month increase in voucher payments. In lease-up data, however, enough landlords do respond to increased payments to equalize the flow of voucher tenants into high-vs. lowrent neighborhoods. Using tax data and listings from a website specializing in subsidized housing, we characterize a group of marginal opportunity landlords who respond to higher payments. Marginal opportunity landlords are relatively rare, list their units near market rates, operate on a small scale, and negatively select into the voucher program based on hard-to-observe differences in unit quality.

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Section: Small Area Fair Market Rents In Washington DCsupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Landlords and Access to Opportunity

Aliprantis

Martin

Phillips

2019

Working Paper (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland)

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“…After the policy change, the rate of voucher tenants moving in equalizes. Overall, these results are quite similar to those of Collinson and Ganong (2018), who find that the adoption of SAMFR limits in Dallas led to improvements in neighborhood quality for voucher households that move.…”

supporting

confidence: 82%

Can Landlords Be Paid to Stop Avoiding Voucher Tenants?

Aliprantis

Martin

Phillips³

2019

Working Paper (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland)

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Despite being eligible for use in any neighborhood, housing choice vouchers tend to be redeemed in low-opportunity neighborhoods. This paper investigates whether landlord behavior contributes to this outcome by studying the recent expansion of neighborhood-based voucher limits in Washington, DC. We conduct two waves of a correspondence experiment: one before and one after the expansion. Landlords heavily penalize tenants who indicate a desire to pay by voucher. The voucher penalty is larger in high-rent neighborhoods, pushing voucher tenants to low-rent neighborhoods. We fi nd no evidence that indexing rents to small areas aff ects landlord acceptance of voucher tenants. The data can reject the claim that increasing rent limits by less than $3,000 per month can eliminate the voucher penalty. Neighborhood rent limits do shift lease-up locations toward high-rent neighborhoods in the year after the policy change, an eff ect that is large relative to the number of voucher households that move but small relative to all voucher tenants.

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“…Changes in neighborhood quality were much smaller for Section 8 movers than for MTO movers, and variation by site was large. Since only about a quarter of eligible households are currently able to obtain a Section 8 housing voucher (Sard and Fischer (2012)), an area for future research is understanding what changes in voucher policy might optimize the extent to which households are able to realize positive neighborhood effects through the subsidy, and which of these policies might be feasible to implement (McClure (2010), Collinson and Ganong (2018)).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While this limited mobility does restrict the evidence provided by MTO about neighborhood effects (Wilson (1987)), we think this mobility provides clear evidence for policy. Providing access to opportunity neighborhoods will require trying more interventions, whether that means making subsidies tied to smaller geographic areas (Collinson and Ganong (2018)), supporting landlords with capital-needs financing and program streamlining (Galvez et al (2010)), or experimenting with other models of assistance to make voucher tenants more attractive to landlords (Phillips (2017)) and to increase supply (Geyer and Sieg (2013)).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%