https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7097-1679
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ABSTRACT
Housing policy in the United States has long been characterized by unequal investment in homeownership and low-income rental assistance, with implications for racial (and ethnic) inequality in access to stable housing. In this study, I examine socioeconomic status and neighborhood characteristics of non-Hispanic White and non-Hispanic Black adults with children receiving HUD rental assistance using a nationally representative linked survey-administrative dataset. Results show that Black and White adults who receive rental assistance tend to have similar (low) incomes, yet Black adults experience significantly higher levels of neighborhood disadvantage than White adults. Furthermore, living in poverty is a substantially stronger predictor of receiving HUD rental assistance for White than Black adults. The results support the notion that rental assistance programs are a last resort for White households, many of whom may benefit from historical federal government support for homeownership. Rental assistance serves as an important safety net for Black families but fails to provide significant improvement in the neighborhood environment. The results contribute to a comprehensive understanding of racial inequality in the impacts of U.S. rental housing policy and the historical legacy of racial exclusion in U.S. homeownership programs.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Michel Boudreaux, Natalie Slopen, Sandra Newman, Vincent Reina, Lydia Wileden, and Heather Randell for helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The decision in United States vs. Certain Lands in City of Louisville (1935) prevented the federal government from using eminent domain powers to site public housing (Meehan, Citation1979; Vale, Citation2000). As a result, the Housing Act of 1937 situated control over the administration of the public housing program at the local level.
2. Federal investments in suburban housing construction were varied and occurred beyond the FHA. They included the GI Bill, the VA, the increasing importance of mortgage interest and property tax deductions, and significant road and highway construction.
3. Homeowner assistance is largely provided through the tax code while rental assistance appears as a welfare benefit (Radford, Citation1996). As a result, the financial cost of homeowner supports is largely hidden from budget discussions, since this is not seen as a welfare program. In contrast, HUD rental assistance programs are far more sensitive to budgetary concerns of presidential administrations, and financial investment has not kept pace with demand. However, given large expenditures on homeowner supports, the rental assistance shortage does not reflect a lack of resources but an intentional arrangement of federal housing priorities.
4. PHAs do not administer multifamily housing programs such as Project-Based Section 8, which house more than two million people. Private development owners negotiate directly with HUD regional offices and maintain some discretion over participant eligibility.
5. Baseline HUD rental assistance requires that tenants have incomes below 80% of area median income (AMI) in public housing and 50% AMI in the housing choice vouchers program. HUD also requires that public housing agencies maintain 75% of vouchers and 40% of public housing units for families below 30% AMI. In practice, public housing agencies retain significant discretion in setting other eligibility criteria or priorities. Privately owned assisted housing eligibility criteria are largely set by development owners.
6. Privately owned assisted housing is comprised of Project-Based Section 8 and other multifamily housing programs including Section 202 (Supporting Housing for the Elderly), Section 811 (Supportive Housing for Persons with Disabilities). HUD directly supports privately owned developments that maintain affordable units for assisted families. This program category does not include the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, which is the largest federal affordable housing construction program.
7. The author currently has access to the 1999–2012 restricted-use linked file for these data.
8. The deterministic matching process requires that only records with a valid Social Security number (SSN) are eligible for linkage. The algorithm first matches individuals in the NHIS and HUD data systems using SSN. Then the matches are validated using first name, middle initial, last name, month of birth, day of birth, year of birth, ZIP code of residence, and state of residence. Agreement on at least 50% of these identifiers means the match was retained as deterministic and coded as “linked” (See, Lloyd et al., Citation2017 for more detail).
9. Racial and ethnic groups other than non-Hispanic White and non-Hispanic Black are excluded for two reasons. First, sample sizes of racial/ethnic groups other than Hispanic (e.g., Asian, Native) are not large enough to attain sufficient statistical power. Second, the historical development of racial inequality in housing with respect to federal rental assistance largely pertains to White and Black populations (i.e., Hispanic and Asian populations receiving rental assistance were very small during the beginning of the program).
10. These neighborhood thresholds largely conform to HUD definitions of high-poverty and low-poverty neighborhoods.
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Andrew Fenelon
Andrew Fenelon is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Penn State University, University Park. His research focuses on housing policy, population health, and health inequalities. His recent work examines the impact of federal rental assistance programs on health, well-being, and neighborhood attainment across the life course.