Revisiting Rental Housing: Policies, Programs, and Priorities

6. Subsidized Housing and Employment: Building Evidence of What Works

191 For many years, policymakers have agreed that low-income, working-age people who receive rent subsidies from the government ought to strive for selfsuf ficiency and that the housing subsidy system should play an actively supportive role—or at least not stand in the way. This intent is clear in the most recent major public housing reform legislation, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998, which makes promoting residents’ self-sufficiency a core objective. At the same time, there is a widely shared belief that government needs to push further in this direction, as reflected in the 2002 recommendation of the Millennial Housing Commission that “more should be done to link housing assistance with economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility” (Millennial Housing Commission 2002, p. 56). Reflecting this long-standing interest, a variety of self-sufficiency innovations and housing policy reforms have been tried over the past two decades, and new ones are being proposed all the time. Yet what is striking about innovation in this field—proposed or actual—is that so little of it is based on credible evidence of what works. Rare are the kinds of rigorous impact evaluations based on randomized controlled trials that have become more common in the welfare-to-work and workforce development fields and that are increasingly used in criminal justice and Subsidized Housing and Employment: Building Evidence of What Works james a. riccio 6 192 james a. riccio education research.1 This, of course, makes it difficult to know whether selfsuf ficiency strategies for assisted housing that sound promising are really a good bet or a bad investment. Given that many work-promoting services and supports exist outside subsidized housing and are already available to assisted residents, do interventions that are explicitly linked to housing subsidies really add value? A number of descriptive and nonexperimental studies suggest that they might, but most studies are limited by the absence of appropriate control groups or have other data or methodological limitations that make it impossible to know for sure. In addition, many such evaluations do not carefully explore in depth how the programs are administered on the ground, and many do not include even rudimentary benefit-cost assessments. Also uncertain is whether basic housing assistance in and of itself promotes or impedes residents’ progress toward self-sufficiency. Countervailing forces are at play, and theory can be mustered to support competing claims, thus contributing to a need for more convincing evidence. This chapter argues for building a stronger base of evidence in the housing and employment policy arena through an expanded use of randomized controlled trials . Greater use of this methodology, which involves comparing outcomes of program and control groups to which eligible people have been assigned through a lottery-like process, is technically feasible and practical, and it could substantially improve the body of evidence on what works. With better knowledge in hand, policymakers and others who wish to improve self-sufficiency outcomes could rely less on hunches and hope in deciding how to achieve those aims. Indeed, many experts see more credible evidence as an urgent policy need (see, for example, Newman 1999; Sard and Bogdon 2003; Shroder 2000; Solomon 2006). Intervening in the Subsidized Housing System to Promote Work Three main types of programs make up the federal housing assistance system for very low-income families: public housing, tenant-based portable rent vouchers for families to use in seeking private rental housing (known formally as housing choice vouchers), and project-based subsidies, which are attached to privately owned housing units.2 This system is administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and 1. Mark Shroder (2000) summarizes eight housing-related experiments funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since the 1970s, starting with the Experimental Housing Allowance program. Most focus on housing-specific outcomes—such as take-up of rent subsidies , housing expenditures, and mortgage delinquency—rather than on self-sufficiency results. More recent experiments that do focus more on self-sufficiency outcomes are the Moving to Opportunity and Welfare to Work Voucher demonstrations, which are discussed later in this chapter. 2. Substantial parts of this section were prepared with assistance and written contributions from Sandra Newman and Joseph Harkness of the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University. subsidized housing and employment 193 Urban Development (HUD) through...