Work Requirements in Public Housing: Impacts on Tenant Employment and Evictions

Abstract

In recent years, many have debated adopting work requirements in the public housing program, and a limited number of public housing agencies (PHA) have implemented these policies through the flexibility provided by the Moving to Work program. One such agency—the Charlotte Housing Authority (CHA)—has implemented a work requirement across five (of 15) public housing developments that mandates households to work 15 hr weekly or face sanctions. This article evaluates this policy and presents the first empirical analysis on the outcomes of a work requirement on employment and evictions. We find that, following work requirement enforcement, the percentage of impacted households paying minimum rent (a proxy for nonemployment) decreased versus a comparison group. Analysis of additional data on both employment and hours worked indicates similar results regarding employment gains, but no increase in average hours worked. We find no evidence that work requirement sanctions increased evictions, and very modest evidence that enforcement increased the rate of positive move-outs such as moves to unsubsidized housing.

Keywords:

• Work requirements
• public housing
• employment
• evictions

Notes

1. For brevity, we refer to the Public Housing and HCV Programs as the public housing program throughout the article. We also refer to participants in these two programs as public housing residents. When discussing public housing (i.e., Section 9) exclusively, we will refer to these as public housing (Section 9) developments.

2. Congress has just authorized the inclusion of 100 new PHAs into the MTW program (NLIHC, 2015).

3. Except in some situations in the HCV Program, public housing rents are set at 30% of the household’s income, adjusted for deductions like childcare and medical expenses.

4. The act also includes a long list of persons who are exempt from this requirement including those who are already working, in a training program, elderly or disabled, and other groups.

5. Atlanta, Champaign, Charlotte, Chicago, Delaware, Lawrence-Douglas, Louisville, and San Bernardino.

6. Several other MTW agencies have implemented policies that function as quasiwork requirements—such as raising minimum rents to a level (e.g., $200 per month) whereby tenants would need some wage income to meet the rent payment. Note, however, that these policies do not require PHAs to verify whether participants are employed.

7. Households that are minimum renters earn less than $3,000 annually in total income, adjusted for various allowances (e.g., out-of-pocket medical expenses or elderly/disabled household members). Residents may cease being minimum renters for several reasons, including gaining employment or beginning to earn benefits such as welfare or disability. As case managers work with residents to both gain employment and enroll in appropriate benefits programs, we feel that paying minimum rent is a good proxy of the effectiveness of supportive services and the work requirement.

8. In addition to the analyses presented here, we also constructed a regression equation that only utilized the propensity score distance function as a control. Similar to the analysis presented, that equation indicated a statistically significant difference in differences between both treatment groups and the control group, with both treatment groups achieving larger t values than the model presented here did (3.109 for Treatment Group A and 2.092 for Treatment Group B).

9. In additional analyses (available from the authors), we examined average hours worked between those employed before work requirement enforcement and those who gained employment following enforcement. We found that, among those previously working, hours worked did not increase following enforcement for either Treatment Group A or B (between 30–35 and 25–30 hr, respectively). Those gaining employment following enforcement worked slightly fewer hours, on average, than households previously employed (between 25 and 30 hr for Treatment Group A, and 20–25 hr for Treatment Group B).

10. One should note that, at this time, residents were unaware when the CHA would begin enforcing the work requirement.