Is subsidized housing in sustainable neighborhoods? Evidence from Chicago

Abstract

This article explores the connection between subsidized housing and sustainable urban form. Given the general disconnect between new market-rate housing in sustainable, walkable neighborhoods and affordable housing opportunities, we expect affordable housing to be located in less sustainable locations in terms of proximity to amenities, walkability, street connectivity, density, and diversity of urban form. A rich set of parcel and planning data for the city of Chicago was used to correlate sustainability indicators with the locations of both project-and tenantbased affordable housing programs. Difference-in-means tests and other descriptive statistical analysis suggest that project-based locations (with the exception of Chicago Housing Authority family units) actually score above average, especially in terms of accessibility and walkability, albeit it at the cost of concentrated poverty, racial segregation, and crime. In contrast, vouchers are located in less sustainable locations when it comes to accessibility and walkability, although they are in neighborhoods with more diversity and less poverty -and, at lower voucher concentrations, with less segregation and crime -than project units.

The Walkable Neighborhood: A Literature Review

“…Neighborhoods might be walkable in terms of physical metrics like small block size and land use diversity (Lee 2007) but they might underperform on other dimensions, like school quality and crime (Pendall & Parilla, 2011;Been et al, 2010). The complication is that not all factors comprising the walkable neighborhood may align -neighborhoods might be mixed use but high crime, they might be mixed in income but have low access, or they might have walkable urban form with no diversity of land use (Talen and Koschinsky, 2011).…”

Brief Report: Characterizing the Burden of Cardiometabolic Disease among Public Housing Residents Served by an Urban Hospital System

“…Public housing (PH) residents are a vulnerable population who often live in high poverty and high crime areas with limited access to health-promoting resources. 1,2 Researchers have documented the higher prevalence of adverse health outcomes and hospitalizations among public housing residents compared with the general population [3][4][5][6] but few have examined risk factors for cardiometabolic (CMD) disease, such as smoking, hypertension, and prediabetes. 7,8 Furthermore, the reports that have examined the risk of CMD among public housing residents have typically relied on selfreported data with small samples and heterogeneous comparison groups.…”

Achieving a Socio-Spatial Mix? Prospects and Limitations of Social Housing Policy in Santiago de Chile

“…In turn, rental subsidies by means of demand-or voucher-based systems tend to lead to further concentration of lowincome households in disadvantaged locations (Fenton 2011;Wyly & DeFilippis, 2010), even though they seem to fare better in terms of segregation and poverty concentration than social housing projects (Talen & Koschinsky, 2011). Finally, recent gentrification and urban renewal processes on inner cities "close" even more residential areas to low-income households, leading to their further spatial concentration (Hedin et al, 2012).…”