How to attract more landlords to the housing choice voucher program: a case study of landlord outreach efforts

Abstract

Since 1980, the focus of American housing policy has shifted away from project-based to tenant-based subsidies, i.e. the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP). Yet many HCVP recipients have remained in high-poverty and high-minority areas of central cities. To improve the effectiveness of HCVP in expanding residential choices, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is encouraging local public housing authorities to utilize a variety of techniques to provide more opportunity for voucher recipients to move to low poverty areas including meetings with current or prospective owners, owners' newsletters, owner fairs, program videos and direct contact with owners. Although there has been a considerable body of research on voucher recipients in the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity programs, two special housing voucher programs, there has been little research on the effectiveness of landlord outreach efforts as part of the regular HCVP. We therefore conducted a case study of landlord outreach efforts currently being implemented by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. We combined observation of landlord outreach events with semi-structured interviews to determine reasons why landlords do or do not participate, landlords' perceptions on the extent to which HCVP addresses their concerns, what they take away from these events, and how outreach efforts might be improved. This case study indicates that there is considerable room for improvement in landlord outreach efforts by the housing authority. The policy implications for HUD as well as public housing authorities across the United States are discussed.

Why Poor Families Move (And Where They Go): Reactive Mobility and Residential Decisions

“…Housing authority staff could also work to build relationships with landlords in high‐opportunity neighborhoods, and promote the benefits of the voucher program (which include guaranteed fair‐market rent and criminal background checks for all tenants) (Garboden, Rosen, DeLuca and Edin ; Varady et al. ).…”

“…Thus, housing authority staff could provide lists of apartments that are pre-vetted by inspectors in low-poverty areas, providing a "nudge" for families to make different neighborhood choices (Thaler and Sunstein 2008, although see Rosenblatt and Cossyleon 2018 for a discussion of limitations to such approaches). Housing authority staff could also work to build relationships with landlords in highopportunity neighborhoods, and promote the benefits of the voucher program (which include guaranteed fair-market rent and criminal background checks for all tenants) (Garboden, Rosen, DeLuca and Edin 2018;Varady et al 2016).…”

Understanding the Divergent Logics of Landlords: Circumstantial versus Deliberate Pathways

“…Others discriminate against voucher holders by charging differential rents (Desmond and Perkins 2016) or refusing to rent to them in the first place (Varady et al. 2017), and their choices around vouchers can determine the ability of tenants to make use of the program (DeLuca et al. 2013).…”

“…Perceptions of financial pressure and “bad tenants” can also influence landlord willingness to accept voucher holders, limiting their access to housing (Varady et al. 2017). More broadly, landlords’ perceptions of tenants who use the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program as a whole, as well as their ideas about “helping” such tenants, influence their willingness to participate in the program (Greenlee 2014).…”

“…Such an understanding can also inform housing policies that increasingly focus on landlords (Schwartz 2010; Varady et al. 2017), making sure that program incentives align with the logics of targeted landlords.…”