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Tenant-based rental assistance has received much attention as a tool to ameliorate American poverty and income segregation. We examined whether a tenant-based voucher program improves long-term exposure to neighbourhood opportunity overall and across multiple domains—social/economic, educational, and health/environmental—among low-income families with children. We used data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment (1994–2010) with a 10- to 15-year follow-up period and used an innovative and multidimensional measure of neighbourhood opportunities for children. Compared with controls in public housing, MTO voucher recipients experienced improvement in neighbourhood opportunity overall and across domains during the entire study period, with a larger treatment effect for families in the MTO voucher group who received supplementary housing counselling, than the Section 8 voucher group. Our results also suggests that effects of housing vouchers on neighbourhood opportunity may not be uniform across subgroups. Results from model-based recursive partitioning for neighbourhood opportunity identified several potential effect modifiers for housing vouchers, including study sites, health and developmental problems of household members, and having vehicle access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars have acknowledged that shrinking federal resources for low-income housing programs increase economic inequality across the U.S. society as a whole, the question of how the allocation of these resources affects inequality among the poor has received little attention. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examines local administrative practices of distributing scarce housing resources and the potential redistributive effects of those choices. Analyses of administrative and qualitative data collected from local housing agencies suggest that local administrative practices of managing a waitlist disadvantage residentially unstable applicants. Juxtaposing this finding with results from the Survey of Income and Program Participation suggests that among those who are income-eligible for program participation, poorer individuals have a greater likelihood of experiencing residential instability, thus compounding their disadvantage in the competition for a housing voucher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]