Taking Stock: What Drives Landlord Participation in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

ABSTRACT

To succeed, the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program must be attractive to rental property owners. When landlords refuse to accept subsidized renters, lease-up rates decline, administrative costs increase, and options become limited to high-poverty neighborhoods where owners are most desperate. This article examines what motivates landlords’ decisions to accept subsidized tenants. We use 127 interviews with a random and field sample of landlords, combined with administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on property ownership in Baltimore, Maryland, Dallas, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio. We find that landlords’ perspectives on the HCV program, including rents, tenants, and inspections, are highly dependent on context; landlords weigh the costs and benefits of program participation against the counterfactual tenant that a landlord might otherwise rent to in the open market. We argue that policymakers can boost landlord participation by better understanding how landlords think about their alternatives within each local context. Finally, we consider what drives nonparticipation in the program. Our results show that the majority of landlords who refuse voucher holders had accepted them previously. We suggest that policy reform should be dually focused on improving bureaucratic inefficiencies that deter landlord participation, and providing training and education to landlords.

KEYWORDS:

• vouchers
• rental housing
• HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)

Acknowledgments

The team would like to thank Melody Boyd, Brianna Bueltmann, Hana Clemens, Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski, Jennifer Darrah, Meredith Greif, Christine Jang, Barbara Kiviat, Ann Owens, Ben Schwartz, and Stephen Wong for assistance with data collection. Peter Durham, Ryan Kellner, Daniel Kim, Katy Li, Emily Rencsok, and Kevin Wells provided invaluable work on coding and data cleaning. Participants in the 2016 Baltimore Social Policy Fellows program (Rachel Becker, Elizabeth Fassa, Danielle Blustein, Andrew Hernandez, Elliot Kim, Tommy Koh, Dikshant Malla, Rebecca VanVoorhees, Maggie Weese) assisted in the initial coding work for this project.

Disclosure Statement

The work that provided the basis for this publication was supported by funding under a grant with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The substance and findings of the work are dedicated to the public. The author and publisher are solely responsible for the accuracy of the statements and interpretations contained in this publication. Such interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views of the Government.

Notes

1. Throughout, we refer to both owners and managers as landlords.

2. Prior to 2002 there were substantially fewer records, reflecting lower voucher numbers and less complete data. The bulk of analyses used here are from the 93,000 records for 2015.

3. However, because of Moving to Work reporting requirements, data from Baltimore City were largely incomplete during that year (more than 90% missing), and thus descriptive information related to property ownership and unit characteristics from Baltimore is reported from 2005, the most recent year in which the data were complete.

4. See Garboden and Rosen (forthcoming) for more details on the methods employed for this project.

5. We lack data on any unsubsidized units a landlord may own. Nevertheless, the distribution of the subsidized stock is relevant across sites.

6. Small properties contain less than five units. Large buildings contain more than 20.

7. Tenants who moved prior to the SAFMR are grandfathered in for a period of time.

8. We are currently implementing a replication in Washington, DC.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Office of University Partnerships, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy; the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York University; and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.