Taking Stock: What Drives Landlord Participation in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Garboden, Philip M. E.; Rosen, Eva; DeLuca, Stefanie; Edin, Kathryn

doi:10.1080/10511482.2018.1502202

Cited by 56 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…This fact likely reflects an inability to find a landlord willing to take a voucher. This interpretation matches the qualitative literature, which finds that landlords actively screen voucher tenants and select which units to market to cash versus voucher tenants (Popkin and Cunningham, 2000;Rosen, 2014;Greenlee, 2014;Desmond, 2016;Garboden et al, 2018). In this view, landlords may restrict tenants access to opportunity neighborhoods when tenants wish to move.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 77%

“…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). These studies find that some landlords actively avoid vouchers due to concerns about property damage and regulatory burden or screen on other characteristics, such as family size, race, and public housing, that can correlate with use of a voucher.…”

Section: As Shown Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 Traditionally, vouchers are capped at a metro-wide FMR, with HUD setting FMR at the 40th percentile of rent for all units with the same number of bedrooms in the entire metro area. 4 Since the FMR limit is constant across the entire metro area, high-rent landlords could have very limited incentives to participate, and the qualitative literature argues that the value of FMR relative to market rents drives much of landlords' responses to vouchers (Garboden et al, 2018).…”

Section: Housing Voucher Payment Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, landlords may actively screen tenants based on voucher status. While the qualitative literature provides many examples of such behavior (Popkin and Cunningham, 2000;Rosen, 2014;Greenlee, 2014;Desmond, 2016;Garboden et al, 2018), this issue has been largely ignored by the economics literature. 5 Second, landlords might change the rent they charge in response to the voucher program.…”

Section: A Model Of Landlord Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

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: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Section: As Shown Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Housing Voucher Payment Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Model Of Landlord Decisionsmentioning

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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“…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 , although see Rosenblatt and Cossyleon for a discussion of limitations to such approaches). 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. ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2019

Self Cite

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Despite frequent moves, low‐income black families are more likely than any other group to churn among disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the least likely to escape them. Traditional explanations for neighborhood inequality invoke racial preferences and barriers to living in high‐income neighborhoods, but recent work suggests that it is also involuntary mobility—such as eviction—which predicts the neighborhood destinations of poor African American families in urban areas. However, we know little about how individuals actually make residential decisions under such unplanned and constrained conditions. Using longitudinal interviews with low‐income African‐American families residing in Mobile, AL, and Baltimore, MD, we describe the array of factors that lead poor black families to move, and describe how families secure housing in the wake of unplanned mobility. We observe that moving among the poor is more reactive than it is voluntary: Approximately 70 percent of most recent moves are catalyzed by landlords, housing quality failures, and violence. We show how this reactive mobility both accelerates and hampers residential selection in ways that may reproduce neighborhood context and inequality. Where mobility is characterized by a greater degree of agency, we show that the strategies families use to make decisions often prohibit them from investigating a wider range of residential options.

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policies to Reduce and Prevent Homelessness: What We Know and Gaps in the Research

Evans¹,

Phillips²,

Ruffini³

2021

J Policy Anal Manage

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Homelessness may be both a cause of and one of the more extreme outcomes of poverty. Governments at all levels and private organizations have a variety of tools to combat homelessness, and these strategies have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. In this paper, we catalog the policy responses and the existing literature on the effectiveness of these strategies, focusing on studies of individual‐level effects from randomized controlled trial evaluations and the best quasi‐experimental designs. We conclude by discussing outstanding questions that can be addressed with these same methods.

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Taking Stock: What Drives Landlord Participation in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Cited by 56 publications

References 21 publications

Landlords and Access to Opportunity

Landlords and Access to Opportunity

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

policies to Reduce and Prevent Homelessness: What We Know and Gaps in the Research

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