The Effect of Housing Choice Voucher Households on Neighborhood Crime: Longitudinal Evidence From Dallas

Zandt, Shannon S. Van; Mhatre, Pratik

doi:10.1002/pop4.36

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…They found that homicides moved to the parts of the city where public housing and voucher tenants moved, although their analyses were cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. Van Zandt and Mhatre (2009) examined the relationship between clusters of housing voucher households and crime in Dallas, TX. They considered a cluster to be 10 or more voucher households during any month between October 2003 and July 2006, and examined crime data within a quarter-mile radius of the apartment complexes containing these voucher clusters.…”

Section: Empirical Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Housing Vouchers on Crime in US Cities and Suburbs

Lens

2013

Urban Studies

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This paper tests the common belief that subsidised housing contributes to higher crime rates. To do this, panel data on over 200 US cities are used and fixed effects models are estimated to control for unobserved differences between cities that may affect both voucher use and crime. Additionally, models are estimated that focus on the suburbs, to see if the steady increase in vouchers there has had any effect on crime. In cities, it is found that vouchers have a weak, negative relationship with violent crime rates, although these estimates are not particularly robust. In suburban areas, there is no observed relationship between vouchers and crime, suggesting that controversies in those communities blaming voucher households for elevated crime rates are misguided.

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Section: Empirical Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Housing Vouchers on Crime in US Cities and Suburbs

Lens

2013

Urban Studies

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“…One unpublished paper specifically analyzes the effect of voucher locations on surrounding crime rates. Van Zandt and Mhatre (2009) analyze crime data within a quarter mile radius of apartment complexes containing 10 or more voucher households during any month between October 2003 and July 2006 in Dallas. Unfortunately, the police did not collect crime data in these areas if the number of voucher households dipped below 10, leading to gaps in coverage and limiting the number and type of neighborhoods examined.…”

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confidence: 99%

American murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime?

Ellen

Lens²,

O’Regan

2012

Housing Policy Debate

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Potential neighbors often express worries that Housing Choice Voucher holders heighten crime. Yet, no research systematically examines the link between the presence of voucher holders in a neighborhood and crime. Our article aims to do just this, using longitudinal, neighborhood-level crime, and voucher utilization data in 10 large US cities. We test whether the presence of additional voucher holders leads to elevated crime, controlling for neighborhood fixed effects, timevarying neighborhood characteristics, and trends in the broader sub-city area in which the neighborhood is located. In brief, crime tends to be higher in census tracts with more voucher households, but that positive relationship becomes insignificant after we control for unobserved differences across census tracts and falls further when we control for trends in the broader area. We find far more evidence for an alternative causal story; voucher use in a neighborhood tends to increase in tracts that have seen increases in crime, suggesting that voucher holders tend to move into neighborhoods where crime is elevated.

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“…While this study focused specifically on transportation affordability, there are potential tradeoffs of location efficiency characteristics and other qualities of the area. Some possible tradeoffs mentioned in affordable housing literature are school quality [42], congestion [43], neighborhood crime [44], pollution or environmental quality [43], poverty concentration and racial segregation [45]. Our study did not capture such tradeoffs due to data limitations at the national level, but again the focus of this study was not on the residential choice of low-income households, rather to measure the effectiveness of HUD programs in terms of transportation affordability.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A National Study on Transportation Affordability of HUD Housing Assistance Programs

Jahan

Hamidi

2019

Sustainability

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This national study is an effort to measure transportation costs and affordability for the major Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing assistance programs since the transportation costs are the second largest expense of American households. This study estimates transportation costs for 76,000 address level properties from seven major HUD-designated affordable housing programs. Our transportation cost models are tailored for low-income households and account for built environmental determinants of travel, known as D variables, at the disaggregated level. We found that more than 44% of these properties in 326 U.S. metropolitan areas are unaffordable in terms of transportation costs. That could result in a waste of over $37.9 billion HUD spends annually to run these programs and subsidize housing for low-income families while some of these families spend substantial amount of their income on transportation. Our findings suggest that the provision of subsidized housing in mixed use, and transit-served neighborhoods would help low-income households to reduce their transportation costs even in auto-oriented sprawling regions. This study concludes with policy recommendations to local and federal governments and transit agencies on ways to incorporate transportation parameters to ensure true affordability for low-income residents of subsidized housing.

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The Effect of Housing Choice Voucher Households on Neighborhood Crime: Longitudinal Evidence From Dallas

Cited by 14 publications

References 23 publications

The Impact of Housing Vouchers on Crime in US Cities and Suburbs

The Impact of Housing Vouchers on Crime in US Cities and Suburbs

American murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime?

A National Study on Transportation Affordability of HUD Housing Assistance Programs

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