WASHINGTON, D.C – Recognizing that public housing projects were creating the very environments they were designed to eliminate, Congress authorized the HOPE VI program in 1992. This program provided funding to demolish public housing complexes, in many cases replacing them with mixed income communities.
While these new communities were intended to reduce poverty concentration by encouraging middle class and poor families to share the same neighborhood, the HOPE VI program did not give residents a right to return to the redeveloped community, and failed to provide one-for-one replacement of public housing units. This contributed to a reduction the nation’s supply of public housing, and also meant that many of the original tenants were not part of the newly developed community.
The families who did not or could not return to public housing after HOPE VI joined the millions of poor families already participating in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. HCV (formerly Section 8) is the largest housing program in the country, subsidizing over 2.2 million households. The program provides tenants with a rent subsidy which they can use to lease any private-market unit renting at or lower than 40-50 percent of the metropolitan area median rent.
Voucher holders are no more likely to relocate to low-poverty communities than poor renters who do not receive federal housing assistance. There are also significant racial differences in the program. Minority voucher users are even less likely than whites to move to better communities, and the proportion of voucher recipients in such neighborhoods shrinks when recipients are mostly black and unassisted households are mostly white.
A multi-year study of family dynamics and housing mobility that Johns Hopkins University conducted in Mobile, Alabama helps explain why the program doesn’t work as designed.
Almost a quarter of the HCV households in the Mobile area live in the highest poverty neighborhoods. Between 2009 and 2012, we talked with more than 100 low-income African-American families across Mobile about the places they had lived in the past and their reasons for moving.
Because the supply of vouchers lags far behind the demand, housing authorities often maintain waitlists that are thousands of names long. In many cities, the names on the waitlists are so stale that administrators have abandoned a “first come, first served” policy and instead select families randomly when turnover vouchers become available.
Once families do receive their voucher, they are limited in the amount of time they have to search for a unit. With such a high demand, housing authorities are under pressure to rescind the voucher if a family can’t find a unit in the allotted time.
Mothers responded to this time crunch in a number of ways that reduced their chances of moving into higher-opportunity areas. Some relied on their social networks to refer them to a landlord, which often meant that families took a housing unit in a poor or segregated neighborhood.
Another factor that limits the geographic scope of the housing search is “the list,” a sheet of available properties given to families by the housing authority. Some believed (incorrectly) that they were not allowed to use their vouchers at places which weren’t on the list. There were nearly 200 properties on this list, but only nine were in non-segregated neighborhoods and only seven were in non-poor neighborhoods.
Landlord referrals, the housing authority’s limited property list, and a general unfamiliarity with better off neighborhoods helped channel families into other poor, segregated neighborhoods.
These barriers are reinforced by some aspects of the HCV program’s administration. For example, the way that HUD has traditionally chosen to set maximum “Fair Market Rents” (FMRs), at the 40th (or 50th) percentile of overall metropolitan rents, tends to place rental units in many higher-opportunity communities out of reach.
While the constraints are daunting, there are policy changes that can directly impact them, some of which are currently under consideration at HUD:
- Give more weight to the poverty deconcentration factor in the tool HUD uses to evaluate the administration of HCV.
- Streamline the portability process.
- Experiment with smaller area FMR limits, which would set voucher rents by zip code rather than metropolitan area.
- Extend the voucher search time.
- Expand “mobility programs” that provide counseling to low-income, minority families to help them find housing in low-poverty or non-segregated neighborhoods.
While the nation’s public housing policy is touted as allowing poor families the freedom and “choice” to move to better neighborhoods, our research shows that is frequently not the case. The reality is that many low-income families are stuck living in high poverty, racially segregated areas.
Stefanie DeLuca is Assoc. Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.America’s Wire is an independent, nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.