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New Report Finds Untapped Potential in U.S. Rental Assistance Landscape
Greater investments in federal rental assistance and other policy improvements would help ensure that far more people could live in the community of their choosing. As it is, economic and racial segregation shape where assisted families and individuals live across the country, as we detail in our new analysis and interactive map of the 100 largest (most populous) metropolitan areas.
To understand the location of assisted housing is to know that racist policies are largely responsible for the prevalence of separate and unequal neighborhoods. Practices past and present, public and private — for example redlining, restrictive covenants, and landlord discrimination — all play a major role in the inequities in the metropolitan landscape.
Our analysis looks at the location of households who use the three largest federal rental assistance programs, which account for 84 percent of all households receiving federal rental assistance. We group assisted households and rental units affordable to households using housing vouchers based on the neighborhood poverty rate, a proxy for the kind of schools, jobs, parks, and grocery stores the households likely will have access to. Neighborhoods with high poverty rates often have less access to highly resourced schools, job opportunities, public services, transit, and grocery stores.
We find that some rental assistance programs are better than others at providing households with more neighborhood choice, allowing them to live in areas best suited to their needs. Over half of public housing residents live in high-poverty neighborhoods, often reflecting local patterns of economic and racial segregation. Meanwhile vouchers that are tenant based — that is, issued to a person or family to use in a unit they choose in the private rental market — have the highest rate of use in low-poverty neighborhoods. (See chart.)
But as we detail in the report, all of the programs could do more than they do today to expand housing choice for families, and people should have equal access to resources and opportunity regardless of where they choose to live. Some families may want to live in communities that happen to have higher poverty rates, because, for example, they can be close to friends and family in their social support network.
Rental assistance programs do a lot of good: they help people and families with low incomes afford good-quality, stable housing; sharply cut homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding, and help improve health and well-being for participants. But they alone can’t undo the decades of racist policies behind today’s unequal neighborhoods or gaping income and wealth inequality.
Needed housing policy steps include expanding federal rental assistance to make it available to everyone who needs it, preventing landlord discrimination against assisted households, improving rental assistance to make it easier to use, and ensuring that people with low incomes can rent housing they can afford in a wide range of neighborhoods across every city, suburb, or small town. And it’s essential that policymakers avoid funding cuts and other harmful changes that would make rental assistance less effective.
But ultimately, making people whole will require wide-ranging solutions, from revitalizing neighborhoods to providing educational and economic opportunities to those historically denied them. Our analysis offers a first step toward understanding what housing policy improvements are needed as part of a larger strategy to achieve this goal.
