A recently-released study conducted by University of California, Berkeley of family households with children who leave HUD’s public housing and Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) programs found that households with children that left public housing assistance saw improvements in the areas they moved to - a significant decline in their neighborhood poverty rate. Although households that exited the HCV program also experienced decreases in their neighborhood poverty, those decreases were smaller than the decline in neighborhood poverty that households remaining in HCV housing had.
"The exploratory findings suggest that when people move out of public housing, they are generally moving to new neighborhoods that have lower poverty rates than the neighborhood of the public housing. However, for voucher tenants leaving housing assistance, their unassisted units are generally in neighborhoods with a similar poverty rate to the neighborhood where they were receiving assistance. This is consistent with previous research showing public housing neighborhoods mostly to have higher poverty rates than voucher tenant neighborhoods.
The persistence of highly concentrated poverty surrounding public housing units speaks to the need for continued place-based investment in the neighborhoods where public housing projects are located, as well as ensuring that those investments do not lead to the displacement of existing residents. Although emphasis on mobility strategies has increased within HUD’s housing assistance programs, it is not realistic to assume that mobility strategies are feasible for every resident in a disinvested neighborhood, nor is it necessarily preferable for low-income people to move out of neighborhoods where they have long-term cultural connections and social ties.
It was also found that for both public housing and the Housing Choice Voucher program, participation in the HUD’s Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program boosted the likelihood of homeownership by approximately 25%. Overall, this research provides valuable insight into how households fare after exiting HUD-assisted housing.
The study examined exited HUD-assisted households with children in 14 U.S. counties, administrative data linked with annual residential address, and tenure data from Infogroup."
Source: HUD Office of Policy Research and Development. Examining the Housing and Neighborhood Trajectories for Former HUD-Assisted Households with Children. Prepared by Alex Ramiller & Carolina Reid, UC Berkeley. March 30, 2023.
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