Housing Insecurity and Low-Income Housing Policy in the United States

Abstract

My dissertation examines the intersection of low-income housing programs and housing insecurity among the poor, taking an econometric approach to program evaluation and a sociological approach to examining organizational decision making in program implementation and its implication on economic inequality. First, I examine longitudinal pattern of housing insecurity and the role of housing assistance programs in reducing it. In the years immediately following the Great Recession, social program administration in the United States was extremely challenging. Income and employment instability among housing assistance recipients grew, as did the ranks of people who qualified for assistance, and local public housing authorities were not necessarily prepared to accommodate this volatile situation. Using the first two waves of the Michigan Recession and Recovery Study (2009-10 and 2011), a population-based sample of working-age adults in the three counties in the Detroit metropolitan area, I conducted a propensity score analysis to examine whether housing assistance recipients are less likely to experience housing insecurity events over follow up than income-eligible respondents who do not receive housing assistance. Results suggest that housing assistance was a powerful way to reduce hardship in the wake of the Great Recession and provide empirical support for the continued support and expansion of these programs. Second, I examine the allocation of limited federal resources for low-income housing programs and how it may affect stratification amongst the poor has received less attention. While scholars have acknowledged that shrinking federal resources for low-income housing programs increase stratification among U.S. society as a whole, whether the allocation of these resources exacerbates stratification amongst the poor has received little attention. My study presents a comprehensive conceptual framework that incorporates both local discretion in program implementation and an algorithm of rationing to advance our understanding of the distributional outcomes of federal low-income housing programs. The administrative plans local housing agencies in Michigan use to administer the Housing Choice Voucher program reveal two dominant forms of waitlist preference systems that promote the greater loss from these waitlists of applicants who are experiencing residential instability. Third, I juxtapose this finding with results from the American Community Survey suggests that low-income housing programs are likely to purge applicants from the waitlist in deep poverty, rather than income-eligible applicants with higher incomes.