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Housing-mobility programs and housing choice vouchers provide low-income families with a potentially transformative opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. However, families often face barriers to attaining upward residential mobility; poor health may be one important barrier, although few studies have examined this hypothesis. We used the experimental Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Project (MTO) Study, constructed residential trajectories, and linked neighborhood opportunity measures to over 14,000 addresses of 3526 families across 7 years. We used latent growth curve longitudinal models to test how baseline health modified effects of MTO housing voucher treatment on neighborhood opportunity trajectories. Results show that poor baseline health adversely influenced how the voucher induced upward mobility. Voucher receipt strongly promoted residential mobility if families were healthy; moreover, the low-poverty neighborhood voucher plus counseling treatment promoted higher-opportunity neighborhood attainment than controls, regardless of the baseline health of the family. However, families with health vulnerabilities did not retain the same initial neighborhood gains conferred by the housing choice voucher (HCV) treatment as families without health vulnerabilities. These results suggest that housing counseling may be one necessary element to expand neighborhood choice into higher-opportunity neighborhoods for families with health challenges. Providing housing vouchers alone is insufficient to promote low-income-family high-opportunity moves, for families who have disabilities or special needs. The implications of these results point to scaling up housing-mobility programs, to provide tailored support for low-income families to use HCVs to make high-opportunity moves, which is particularly necessary for families with health challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunity Zones (OZs) promised to stimulate investment in over 8,500 "distressed" neighborhoods. Have OZs increased neighborhood investment and, if so, what types of neighborhoods have benefitted? This study uses a difference-in-differences (DID) design to compare small business and residential lending outcomes in designated OZs with areas that were eligible but not designated. Census tracts are stratified by pretreatment social and economic indicators of distress to search for heterogeneity in effects by neighborhood type. An event study framework is used to check the parallel trends assumption and census tracts are then matched to improve the counterfactual. Finally, an adjusted interrupted time series (AITS) analysis is introduced to further evaluate differences in outcome indicator levels and trends between target and control neighborhoods pre and post OZ. DID and AITS estimates suggest that OZs have had no statistically significant effects on business or residential loan growth. Heterogeneity modeling confirms a noneffect across neighborhood distress type. In conclusion, study limitations and future extensions for both policy and research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online platforms have become an integral component of the housing search process in the United States and other developed contexts, but recent studies have demonstrated that these platforms offer uneven representation of different neighborhoods. In this study, we use listings covering the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas to assess how GoSection8, a platform uniquely focused on affordable housing and voucher-assisted households, compares with the "mainstream" alternatives of Craigslist, Apartments.com, and Zillow. Through descriptive and regression analyses of the housing and neighborhoods represented on these websites and a new way of measuring the distribution of rental housing opportunities, we advance a multisource perspective on the role of online information exchanges in housing search processes. Specifically, we find that GoSection8 and mainstream alternatives capture spatially segmented information about housing markets, with GoSection8 ads representing units that are more affordable but also more constrained to higher-poverty neighborhoods where assisted households are already concentrated. The findings suggest that disadvantaged households are potentially funneled toward high-poverty, isolated neighborhoods by the operation of stratified information systems available for online housing searches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This cross-cultural study provides important insight into the decentralization of affordable housing in the community/family sector in England and China regardless of the different land ownership. It particularly highlights the land element in housing and welfare systems across the Global North and South that are ignored in the literature. Although England and China have different land and housing contexts (such as ownership), the existing literature highlights how they have been undermined by the Right to Buy policy and processes of financialization and argues that new forms of social organizations are needed to resist these pressures. One of the crucial findings was the similar pathway of land governance for housing in England and China since the 1970s. Meanwhile, decentralization of power for housing development was sufficient for stakeholders (from the state to the market, the third sector, and the community/family sector) to engage in affordable housing provision and development, but not a necessary condition for collaborative housing to respond to in these two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, close to 70 million people live in urban slums, which has forced policymakers to pursue aggressive slum upgrading programs. However, without a thorough understanding of individual households' slum formalization preferences, in situ slum upgrading and relocation projects often encounter challenges and resistance from the slum dwellers. This article explores the interconnections among slum dwellers' willingness to participate in situ slum upgrading and slum relocation projects, informality in the built environment, and neighborhood insecurity in the slums of Bihar, India. We examine these questions using the primary household survey conducted in 2016–2017 as part of a project on urban slums of the four largest cities in Bihar. The regression analysis shows that slum dwellers are more likely to accept in situ slum upgrading when they perceive a pressing need for housing and basic amenities. In situ slum upgrading often leads to temporary relocation and smaller dwellings. Slum dwellers are more likely to participate in relocation programs when they feel their neighborhoods are insecure, and when they have experienced violent resolutions to conflicts. These findings imply that the provision of basic infrastructure, including safety and security, could affect slum dwellers' slum upgrading decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is rapidly urbanizing, with hundreds of millions of migrants leaving villages for cities. Under the discriminatory Household Registration (Hukou) System, migrants have been denied urban welfare benefits. The Chinese government has been promoting inclusive urbanization with significant policy changes in recent decades, yet its impact on migrants is not clear. This article examines whether housing is becoming more inclusive to migrants in Chinese cities. A review of recent policy changes at both central and local levels shows that although central housing policy is becoming more inclusive of migrants, local governments have largely remained exclusionary and exercise selective inclusion—allowing only migrants who meet additional, strict requirements to access subsidized housing. The empirical analyses, using two waves of the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, reveal that few migrants have access to subsidized housing despite the policy changes. Institutional barriers continue to exclude migrants from subsidized housing, although many barriers have become less important over time. It is clear that housing discrimination persists, and housing inclusion remains a distant dream for most migrants in China. This research highlights exclusion based on an important but uncommon birth-ascribed status defined by the government and provides a multiscalar perspective on the inclusion of domestic migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although government-led housing affordability policy is an important issue worldwide, there has been little research on how local governments' commitment to such policy affects people's subjective well-being or happiness. By combining the analysis of textual information from provincial governments' annual working reports and microdata from four waves of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), this article empirically explores the relationship between political discourses of provincial governments' committment to housing affordability policies (HAPC) and residents' self-reported happiness. Our results suggest that Chinese urban residents' happiness is higher when the local government promises greater dedication to housing affordability improvement; however, this phenomenon existed only in the early 2010s, and the relationship between HAPC and residents' happiness was insignificant in the mid-2010s, and even became negative in the late 2010s. In addition, we also find that the the association between HAPC and residents' happiness differs among population groups. We conclude the article with discussions of the implications of the findings for housing policymaking and urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Population aging poses challenges to societies with regard to the provision of care for dependent seniors. One of the spheres broadly discussed in terms of long-term care is housing policy. The focus of this article is the analysis of housing policy in Poland, with respect to demographical changes, and the ever increasing burden aging causes (i.e., problems with seniors' ability to perform self-care and age in place). The analysis was based on the existing data and the sizable transdisciplinary body of international comparative housing policy literature. The effectiveness of housing policy in the context of care services depends on its integration with the social assistance and health care system and the size of the housing stock, along with the family's caring potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change poses many threats to residential communities throughout the United States, including by contributing to the increased intensity and duration of disasters like hurricanes and other weather events. Government housing policies may either reduce or amplify vulnerability to storm damage. This article explores how state governments guide affordable housing development to address the risk and damage from hurricanes through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. Using document review, we examine LIHTC plans for states most severely and less severely affected by major hurricanes in the past 20 years by comparing plans before and after a hurricane event. The results indicate that severely affected states make relatively few changes to their plans after a hurricane, compared with neighboring less affected states, regarding siting and location, construction techniques, disaster preparedness, or other storm-related responses. The findings suggest a missed opportunity to redirect affordable housing resources to better protect vulnerable residents from the risks of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the impact of neighborhood homeownership rates on students' achievement in public schools in the U.S. state of Georgia. Homeownership and students' achievement are likely to be endogenously determined at the neighborhood level. We correct for this endogeneity concern using population growth as the instrument for the neighborhood homeownership rate. The findings suggest that a 1-percentage-point increase in homeownership rate at the census tract level increased the percentage of proficient learners and above in third-grade reading by 0.24 percentage points, and the effects are stronger—economically and statistically—in estimates that correct for the endogeneity of neighborhood homeownership rates. Further, the effects of homeownership are much larger in the sample of low-income, less affluent, or more black or African American-dominated neighborhoods, compared with the overall sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private housing buyers' perceptions of housing policies and responses are key determinants of the effectiveness of policies, yet little attention has been paid to them. This article establishes a cognitive-behavioral model to explore how private housing buyers perceive housing policy and respond. Based on a survey conducted in Xi'an, China, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is applied to empirically analyze policy perception and response. The results show that individuals' perception and response vary across homeownership status. About 50% of renters and single-home owners postpone their housing purchase plan whereas 37.40% of multihome owners postpone housing purchase and 10.69% intend to sell their own houses after the implementation of the policy in question. Higher housing policy perception brings about lower housing price expectation, which in turn leads to delay of housing purchase or sale of self-owned houses. In addition, individuals who are female, working in a government sector, public institution or state-owned company, or paying more attention to the housing market are more likely to have higher housing policy perception, whereas older individuals are more likely to have lower housing policy perception. Education level, household income, and housing conditions positively affect the modification of the housing plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the relationship between homeownership and community involvement is mixed and unclear, this study aims to contribute to this debate by further examining the relationship between these two. Using data from the 2019 Metro Atlanta Speaks survey, we find that homeowners and residents with longer community tenure have higher odds of being involved in the community compared with renters in the metro Atlanta region of the U.S. state of Georgia. Among various community activities examined, homeowners are associated with higher odds of participating in parent–teacher association meetings, neighborhood association meetings, and public meetings held by local governments. Because housing needs of and challenges faced by residents are different, a balanced and comprehensive housing policy ensuring safe, decent, and affordable housing options—rental housing and homeownership opportunities—is crucial in stabilizing homeownership rates and in keeping residents in their communities longer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between housing market segmentation and eviction in Richmond, Virginia. Housing market segmentation conceptualizes housing consumption through multiple distinct submarkets instead of a unitary regional market. To examine the production of housing segmentation we rely on an original large-building database for all multifamily buildings in Richmond with more than 25 units, which we complement with qualitative interviews with more than 25 Richmond tenants who have experienced at least one eviction. Our analysis makes three key contributions. First, by placing two different scholarly traditions in conversation—urban economics and critical urban political economy—we foreground the importance of understanding what institutions and actors create and maintain submarkets. Second, the article takes a novel methodological approach to segmentation by analyzing ownership of rental housing and tenant experience. Finally, these approaches allow us to move beyond framing eviction as simply a feature of some rental submarkets and to pose the question about what role eviction plays in creating and maintaining submarkets and class-monopoly rents. We offer evidence that through eviction and the threat of eviction landlords create targeted housing scarcity for specific groups of tenants. We argue for understanding eviction as a formative institution of housing submarkets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. cities are increasingly adopting antieviction policies predicated on the belief that evictions have negative consequences for families and communities. Yet the nature and duration of many of these consequences are relatively unknown. We add to the literature on the consequences of evictions by assessing the enduring effects of eviction on the self-reported health of young adults. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we find evictions have both short-term (12 months) and medium-term (7–8 years) negative impacts on multiple measures of health. Individuals who experience an eviction are more likely to report being in poor general health or experiencing mental health concerns, even many years after an eviction. As state and local governments develop policies to reduce evictions, it is worth noting that any resulting decrease in evictions may have a positive impact on population health, making health professionals effective potential policymaking partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Administrative court records are increasingly used to study the prevalence of eviction. Yet inaccuracies in court records bias estimates of eviction and distort tenants' true rental histories. This is the first study to systematically assess the prevalence of inaccuracies across jurisdictions. Drawing on over 3.6 million administrative eviction court records from 12 states, we find that, on average, 22% of eviction records contain ambiguous information on how the case was resolved or falsely represent a tenant's eviction history. Adjusting for multiple inaccuracies in the data produces significantly different eviction rate estimates. Cases with increased complexity, such as those involving multiple tenants and lawyers, are more likely to contain inaccuracies. However, inaccuracies vary most prominently between states, indicating that state court system characteristics fundamentally shape the official record of the evicted population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many public housing communities are undergoing redevelopment into mixed-income communities, with researchers raising concerns that the redevelopment process may reinforce exclusionary practices and inadequately involve residents in the planning process. These concerns highlight the need to better understand residents' views of public housing communities and the redevelopment process. To fill this gap, we elicited a detailed view of youths' lived experiences within a Boston, Massachusetts, housing development preparing to undergo conversion into a mixed-income community. Using participatory photo mapping and interviews, we partnered with youth co-researchers in an assessment of important community spaces and neighborhood strengths and stressors. Results highlight neighborhood strengths such as social cohesion and stressors such as gun violence. Results also elucidate youths' wishes for the redevelopment, including the creation of formal and informal youth-centered spaces. We discuss implications for policy and practice and consider youths' suggestions in the context of current community development approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than 30 years, housing in Mexico has been undergoing a transformation that is best studied using INFONAVIT and FOVISSSTE as starting points. Both funds were established in 1972 to implement the constitutional right to decent housing for workers and state employees in Mexico. In their first few years, both funds were responsible for, among other things, granting loans and investigating ways to achieve low-cost but high-quality housing. However, in the aftermath of the debt crisis of 1981, a comprehensive reconfiguration of housing provision was pushed forward. The aim of this contribution is to characterize changes in housing policy and ask whether and in what way they can be described as financialization. We argue that financialization is a political-economic project that has developed in a particular, stepwise form. Building on the stylized distinction between destructive (roll-back) and creative (roll-out) moments of financialization, we try to understand how financialization took hold. Two projects—Cuautitlan Izcalli from the 1970s and Huehuetoca from the 2000s—symbolize this change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States experienced its worst housing market collapse since the Great Depression during 2006–2010. This collapse triggered the Great Recession. During the housing market collapse and the Great Recession, about 5.5 million homeowners in the United States lost their homes to foreclosure. In this article, we present findings about the effectiveness of foreclosure prevention counseling. Although many recent studies have examined this issue, almost all have major methodological shortcomings that render their findings less useful for policymakers than they could have been. Using data from a national sample and employing a before–after research design with pre- and postcounseling data for several months, our study avoids the pitfalls of other recent works. We find that counseling is effective in preventing foreclosure for about 39% of homeowners counseled. We identify a few factors that correlate with a positive postcounseling outcome. The findings of this study could improve ongoing foreclosure counseling programs, and thereby assist in stabilizing and reviving the U.S. housing market. Our findings could also improve the design of future foreclosure counseling programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we identify 11 contemporary housing market and policy trends that will frame the next 10 years of federal housing policy. In each case, we review the relevant numbers before summarizing the policy issues raised by those realities. In some cases, these issues prompt specific policy recommendations. In other cases, they point to the need for greater research and debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we highlight the scope of public policy and demographic change for the future path of homeownership. In so doing, we review the literature on the scope of impact of certain policy tools, estimate housing tenure choice models that highlight how sensitive households are to various factors in different time periods to highlight how credit conditions can influence the future path of homeownership, and then simulate the future paths of homeownership in light of prospective changes in young-adult race/ethnicity, education, income, and wealth. The study focuses on prospective changes between 2015 and 2035 to the rate of homeownership among young adults age 25 to 44, prime ages for first-time homebuying. We find that rising education levels—even if minority-white college education gaps were eliminated completely—would only partially reverse the steep declines in young-adult homeownership attainment witnessed since the onset of the housing bust. However, our findings also suggest that the common narrative, which predicts that young-adult homeownership rates will inevitably decline due to increasing racial/ethnic diversity, does not take into account the positive effect of rising educational attainment among minorities on homeownership rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a holistic analysis of why and how federal assisted housing policy (specifically, public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC], and voucher programs) should be reformed in ways that would be more conducive to socially desirable outcomes at the neighborhood level. First, I argue that past research has documented mutually causal interrelationships between assisted housing policy and neighborhoods that have been couched as having negative connotations for both. Second, I argue that there is there a rationale on grounds of both efficiency and equity for altering assisted housing policy so it would encourage the creation and preservation of neighborhoods that are physically of good quality and economically diverse. Third, I advocate a circumspect menu of programmatic reforms that would be gradualist, option enhancing, and relatively budget neutral, yet would garner these positive impacts. As overarching reforms, I propose regional housing institution-building, fair housing law revisions, impaction standards, and diversity incentives built into Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. As reforms to site-based assistance programs, I propose: a new formula for disbursing LIHTC, to repeal and replace the Qualified Census Tract bonus, diversification/preservation incentives for existing assisted private developments, and preserving assisted housing in revitalizing neighborhoods. As reforms to tenant-based assistance programs, I propose: Small Area Fair Market Rents, premove and postmove mobility counseling, ancillary family supports postmove, reducing barriers to lease-up, and diversification incentives in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the customary and reasonable pricing standard imposed by the Dodd–Frank Act, this article considers whether residential real estate appraisers are able to obtain differentiation premiums for their services. Regression models estimated using data from the Commonwealth of Virginia offer some evidence that professional certifications and the complexity of an appraisal task are positively associated with fee levels in this type of regulatory environment. However, differentiation premiums appear more difficult to obtain across geographies and when an appraisal is procured by an appraisal management company. The findings suggest appraisers can differentiate themselves from competitors, but also that policymakers should be mindful of the potential for commodification on the residential appraisal industry in select market settings. Since appraisals are a critical component of the mortgage underwriting process, and the majority of housing transactions utilize mortgage debt, developing new understanding of how policies influence appraisers and how the appraisal process makes an important contribution to the housing policy literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program in the United States and examines its early implementation from its start in 2013 through April 6, 2016. RAD was devised to address the physical deterioration of public housing and secure a more stable funding stream. It requires public housing authorities to shift properties out of the public housing program into a different subsidy program (project-based Section 8) which enables them to obtain mortgages on more favorable terms and to secure tax-credit investment. The program is currently limited to 185,000 housing units. As of April 6th, the program was fully subscribed, and had generated more than $2 billion in new investment. Extrapolating from the early results, RAD has the potential to yield more than $15 billion for fund the redevelopment and renovation of public housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Families using the Housing Choice Voucher Program rarely experience large gains in neighborhood or school quality when compared with unassisted poor renters. Research on housing mobility programs has reached mixed conclusions about whether vouchers can improve neighborhood and school quality, especially in the long term. We revisit these findings using new data from the partial remedy to theThompson v. HUDdesegregation case in Baltimore, known as the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BHMP). Through targeted vouchers, intensive counseling and innovative policy features, the BHMP helped families move to low-poverty, nonsegregated neighborhoods with higher performing school districts. We examine residential outcomes for the first 1,800 families that moved through the program for a period of up to 9 years. We find that BHMP families moved to more integrated and affluent neighborhoods, in school districts with more qualified teachers and fewer poor students—and most families stayed in these neighborhoods beyond their initial lease-up period. Eventually, a small proportion of families moved to neighborhoods that are less white, but still significantly less poor and less segregated than their original communities. We interpret these findings in light of past mobility programs and discuss policy implications for the Housing Choice Voucher Program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that a person’s neighborhood or zip code can predict his or her life outcomes has motivated a host of housing policies aimed at redressing racial segregation and breaking up areas of concentrated poverty. This article critically examines underlying assumptions about high-poverty neighborhoods that motivate those policies. Using ethnographic methods, I present the location preferences of residents living in a low-income neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, and show the ways in which their perceptions of their neighborhood run counter to common portrayals. This analysis provides clues as to why the underlying logic of dispersal and mobility may be flawed. I conclude that place matters very much to people living in this neighborhood, just not in the way commonly implied by dispersal and mobility policy advocates. The implication is that stability, rather than mobility, ought to be the focus of more housing discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) Program is designed to address a $26 billion public housing capital needs backlog. New investment is leveraged by converting public housing to project-based assistance, with ownership transferred to nonprofit and private entities. In other words, RAD is expediting the end of the country’s 80-year-old public housing program. While this may seem like a dramatic policy shift, there is actually little about RAD that is new. This investigation of RAD’s origins reveals it to be the coalescence of existing programs, established policies, and longstanding trends multiple decades in the making. This in turn helps explain why RAD has expanded so quickly and why its expansion is likely to continue. There exists a great need for more research on and monitoring of RAD’s implementation, and for a reassessment of the policy priorities that produced both the program itself and the problem it attempts to solve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze data from a natural experiment involving Denver public housing that quasirandomly assigns low-income Latino and African American youth to neighborhoods. Intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated models reveal substantial effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and safety domains on youth and young adult educational, employment, and fertility outcomes. Effects are contingent on when a youth was first assigned to public housing and the neighborhood characteristic in question. Benefits from neighbors of higher occupational prestige are stronger if a child begins experiencing them at a younger age, whereas negative consequences of neighborhood crime are only manifested for teens. Neighborhood effect sizes apparently depend on the interaction among exposure duration, disruption effects of mobility, and developmental stage-specific differences in vulnerability to the given neighborhood effect mechanism operative. Our results hold powerful and provocative implications for where assisted housing should be developed and how applicants should be assigned to neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the growth and geographic distribution of nontraditional mortgages (NTMs) and subprime mortgages during 2000-2006, and examines the association between these products and homeownership at the county level between 2000 and 2012. It finds a significant relationship between the origination of NTM and subprime mortgages during the boom and changes in the number of homeowners (positive during the 2000-2006 period and negative during the 2006-2012 period) but no significant relationship with the change in the homeownership rate. Looking at specific categories of the population, the results indicate a positive relationship between the presence of NTMs and subprime mortgages and increased numbers of homeowners for young households as well as for low income and minority households, but the relationship is smaller than for the general population. Overall, the relationship between NTMs and homeownership is stronger than the relationship between subprime mortgages and homeownership during the boom and it is less negative during the bust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment to inform how Housing Choice Vouchers and housing mobility policies can assist families living in high-poverty areas to make opportunity moves to higher quality neighborhoods, across a wide range of neighborhood attributes. We compared the neighborhood attainment of the three randomly assigned MTO treatment groups (low-poverty voucher, Section 8 voucher, control group) at 1997 and 2002 locations (4–7 years after baseline), using survey reports, and by linking residential histories to numerous different administrative and population-based data sets. Compared with controls, families in low-poverty and Section 8 groups experienced substantial improvements in neighborhood conditions across diverse measures, including economic conditions, social systems (e.g., collective efficacy), physical features of the environment (e.g., tree cover) and health outcomes. The low-poverty voucher group, moreover, achieved better neighborhood attainment compared with Section 8. Treatment effects were largest for New York, New York, and Los Angeles, California. We discuss the implications of our findings for expanding affordable housing policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Households face many difficult decisions after a disaster, including decisions about whether to rebuild their homes or relocate to a new area. These decisions are bounded by federal housing recovery policy and the ways it is interpreted and applied. In this article, we examine the use of home buyout programs as housing recovery policy tools and assess buyout policy using policy learning theory. According to policy learning theory, policies should evolve and improve over time. Instead, a historical review of buyouts implemented in the United States suggests that policy learning related to buyouts has been, at best, limited. Rather than showing evidence of learning from one iteration to the next, individual buyout programs continue to reflect unique objectives and features, lacking evidence of an iterative process. We propose a novel typology for organizing buyout programs and conclude by exploring implications of this finding and offering recommendations for moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing recognition that the cost of transportation should be included in calculations of housing affordability has led to efforts to promote location efficiency (LE) in affordable housing policy. Because the program is responsible for most new affordable housing in the United States, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program has the potential to be a link between housing affordability and LE. This research analyzes the extent to which LIHTC units built between 2007 and 2011 were in location-efficient places. Ordinary least squares regression analysis was used to test the role of market, policy, developer, and urban form factors in determining state-level LIHTC LE. We find that for the nation as a whole, from a quarter to half of LIHTC units added during this period were in location-efficient places, depending on the LE criteria applied. State-by-state comparisons showed wide variation in both our absolute measures of LIHTC LE and our relative measures of LIHTC LE compared with overall housing in each state. State policy and nonprofit developers were associated with higher LIHTC LE and had a positive effect on a state’s ability to outperform its underlying urban form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of location affordability holds that housing affordability should be augmented to include transportation cost as a related and substantial household cost burden. The recent United States foreclosure crisis of 2006–2008 offers an opportunity to evaluate location affordability as a concept for policy and practice by investigating the relationship between transportation cost burdens and negative housing outcomes. This article contributes to the growing literature on location affordability and the recent crisis with an analysis of default and foreclosure data for 70 metropolitan areas. The analysis includes transportation and housing cost burdens and demographic data, as well as multidimensional measures of urban form. High rates of automobility are associated with increased foreclosure. The urban form variables yield mixed results, suggesting the relationship between urban sprawl and affordability is complex. However, across a range of specifications, high levels of development intensity are associated with increased foreclosure rates. The results have implications for both the housing and transportation sectors and lend support for the notion of location affordability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now accepted that to have an understanding of housing affordability one must consider not only housing costs, but also the transportation costs associated with that household location. To make this information readily accessible to the public, the United States government created an Internet resource, the Location Affordability Portal – Version 2 (www.locationaffordability.info), to provide housing and transportation costs for every neighborhood in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Although the statistical model at the heart of this resource was designed for predictive accuracy, its design and parameter estimates can provide additional insights into the interaction of housing cost and transportation choices (and thus its cost). This study describes the development and explores the policy implications (and limitations) of this structural equations model, the Location Affordability Index Model – Version 2 (LAIM2). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use the Location Affordability Index (LAI) and the newly developed Child Opportunity Index (COI) to assess, for the first time, the tradeoff between neighborhood opportunity and housing/transportation affordability facing low-income renter families in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. In addition to describing the opportunity/affordability relationship, we explore the level of balance between neighborhoods’ relative cost burden and their corresponding opportunity levels to determine whether children of different racial/ethnic groups are more (or less) likely to experience cost-opportunity imbalance. Our multilevel analyses show that housing affordability is largely accounted for by the neighborhood opportunity structure within each metropolitan area. The metropolitan characteristics examined account for only a small proportion of the between-metro variance in the opportunity/affordability gradient for housing, presumably because the neighborhood opportunity structure already reflects metro area factors such as fragmentation and segregation. On the other hand, transportation affordability shows a weaker association with neighborhood opportunity. The COI/LAI association is much weaker for transportation than for housing, and a large part of the variation in the transportation gradient occurs at the metropolitan area level, not the neighborhood level. Sprawl is particularly associated with transportation affordability, with lower sprawl areas having lower transportation-cost burden. We discuss the implications of the empirical findings for defining affordability in housing assistance programs. We recommend that housing policy for low-income renter families adopt an expanded notion of affordability (housing, transportation, and opportunity) and explicitly consider equity (e.g. cost-opportunity imbalance) in the implementation of this expanded affordability definition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rent burdens are increasing in U.S. metropolitan areas while subsidies on privately owned, publicly subsidized rental units are expiring. As a result, some of the few remaining affordable units in opportunity neighborhoods are at risk of being converted to market rate. Policy makers face a decision about whether to devote their efforts and scarce resources toward developing new affordable housing, recapitalizing existing subsidized housing, and/or preserving properties with expiring subsidies. There are several reasons to preserve these subsidies, one being that properties may be located in neighborhoods with greater opportunity. In this article, we use several sources of data at the census tract level to learn how subsidy expirations affect neighborhood opportunity for low-income households. Our analysis presents several key findings. First, we find that units that left the project-based Section 8 program were – on average – in lower opportunity neighborhoods, but these neighborhoods were improving. In addition, properties due to expiry from the Section 8 program between 2011 and 2020 are in higher opportunity neighborhoods than any other subsidy program. On the contrary, new Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units were developed in tracts similar to those where LIHTC units are currently active, which tend to be lower opportunity neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study presents a comparison of housing and transportation costs (H+T) in 4,399 fixed-route transit station areas across the United States. Each station area is classified as a transit-oriented development (TOD), hybrid, or transit-adjacent development (TAD) based on walkability and housing density targets. Station areas with a Walk Score of 70 or greater and a gross housing density of 8 units per acre or more are classified as TOD. Station areas that meet just one of these criteria are classified as hybrids, and those that do not meet either of these criteria are categorized as TAD. The findings reveal a paradox that whereas TOD are more expensive places to buy and rent housing, they are more affordable than hybrids and TAD because the lower cost of transportation offsets housing costs. We argue that policies to increase the density and walkability of hybrid and TAD station areas, which account for two thirds of all station areas across the United States, should be a top priority for both housing and transportation officials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Energy use in residential buildings accounted for 21% of U.S. CO2emissions in 2013. Efforts to reduce energy use in the residential sector have been overly focused on improving energy efficiency of buildings. This article incorporates housing policy debate into energy policy, hoping to provide new opportunities for planners to participate in residential energy policy. Using data from the latest Residential Energy Consumption Survey, structural equation modeling has been applied to isolate the direct and indirect effects of household and housing characteristics on residential energy use. Results show that more than 80% of a household's indirect effect on energy consumption happens through the building characteristics, which is characterized as the housing choice effect on energy consumption. Planners can participate in residential energy management efforts by influencing housing needs and priorities of communities towards more sustainable compact housing units. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article conceptualizes the relationship between housing instability, residential mobility, and neighborhood quality. We summarize the existing literature about residential mobility and housing instability and examine their potential interactions along three dimensions: (a) the reasons for a move, including a variety of push and pull factors; (b) mobility outcomes in terms of whether moves result in residing in a better or worse neighborhood than that of the prior residence; and, especially important for low-income households, (c) the degree to which the current move and past experiences of moving have been discretionary or forced. Housing instability is a cumulative concept, with involuntary moves at its center. This synthetic model of housing instability's impact on mobility outcomes suggests that the more instability a household has experienced, the less likely mobility moves are to occur, or, if they do occur, to be long lasting. Policy implementation may underestimate the interaction between cumulative housing instability and residential mobility in housing mobility policies. Thus, these interactions have implications for mobility policies, pointing toward a path for future research that inform policies to move low-income households toward both greater housing stability and better neighborhood outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]