Promoting Housing Choice in HUD's Rental Assistance Programs, 1995

Promoting Housing Choice provides the first empirical evidence that Section 8 recipients are less likely than public housing residents to be concentrated in distressed urban neighborhoods. However, HUD's analysis of tract-level data from four metropolitan areas (Seattle, Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, Delaware) also suggests that many rental assistance beneficiaries -- particularly African Americans -- remain concentrated in relatively poor and/or racially segregated areas. The report reviews the limited research literature on three categories of potential impediments to greater dispersion of rental assistance households. These impediments are related to:

• Operation of the metropolitan housing market.

• Accessibility of and information about rental housing opportunities.

• Structure and administration of rental assistance programs within metropolitan areas.

Promoting Housing Choice presents information on the history, design, procedures, and results of mobility programs in Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Memphis, Las Vegas, Hartford, and Yonkers, New York. Using locally available data, it finds that mobility programs have enjoyed considerable success in enabling recipients to move to less segregated areas, although it is not yet possible to determine which program elements are most critical to this success. For example, existing data do not yet make it possible to distinguish the effects of housing counseling and landlord outreach from the underlying restrictions many programs place on the use of rental assistance in high-minority neighborhoods.

The report probes the impacts of integrative moves on low-income rental assistance recipients through a discussion of research conducted on well-established mobility programs in Chicago and Cincinnati. Chicago's Gautreaux program, which has accounted for approximately half of the 11,000 households already assisted through mobility programs nationwide, has provided the most insight into the efficacy of the housing mobility concept to date. Research conducted by Professor James Rosenbaum and his colleagues has found that:

• Rental assistance recipients who moved to suburban areas had somewhat higher employment rates than adults who moved to other urban locations.

• Children of families that moved to the suburbs were more likely than children of city movers to succeed in school, go to college, or find full-time jobs after graduating from high school.

• Families moving to suburban locations reported surprisingly few incidents of racial harassment and a high overall level of satisfaction with their new environments.