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Abstract
The high proportion of income that poor families spend on housing can have deleterious consequences for a child’s healthy development. This article asks whether the increased affordability provided by government housing assistance translates into benefits for children. Do assisted housing parents spend more on child enrichment, leading in turn to their children’s healthier development relative to similar income-eligible families not receiving government housing assistance? We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the PSID’s Child Development Supplements, and the PSID-Assisted Housing Database and apply propensity weights and instrumental variables to address selection. Sample sizes are 205 children in the assisted housing group and 470 children in the unassisted group. We find convincing evidence that assisted housing parents invest more in their child’s enrichment than their unassisted counterparts do. These investments benefit their children’s cognitive achievement and overall health, with less consistent effects on socioemotional adjustment.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here
Notes
1. Authors’ calculations using the 2017 American Housing Survey (see the Technical Appendix for details). The widely adopted rule of thumb for defining affordable housing is a ratio of housing costs to income that does not exceed roughly 30%.
2. A recent performance rating of public housing authorities that administer the public housing and housing voucher programs indicated that only 5.5% were rated as troubled (Newman & Holupka, Citation2018).
3. Authors’ analysis of the 2017 American Housing Survey (see the Technical Appendix for details).
4. This should result in a conservative supply IV because HUD’s income eligibility standard, either 80% or 50% of AMI, exceeds the poverty line, which is roughly 30% of AMI nationwide. However, it is worth noting that over at least the last decade, assisted housing tenant income has fallen substantially below the HUD standard. As such, the poverty line provides a good approximation of assisted housing tenant incomes.
5. We also test models that include both IVs (Angrist & Pischke, Citation2009; see our Technical Appendix).
6. A description of our sources of assisted housing addresses, and matching and quality control procedures, is available on the PSID website at http://simba.isr.umich.edu/restrictred/Assistedhousing/aspx
7. We interpolated decennial census and 5-year ACS data to provide annual estimates. The 2006–2010 ACS was the first to cover the entire U.S. population (see the Technical Appendix for details).
8. The mean and median lag between treatment and outcomes is roughly 6 years.
9. To create overlapping pretreatment periods between treatment and comparison cases, we divided the analysis time period into successive 5-year time spans, from 1992–1996 (the first pretreatment period before 1997, the first year in which assisted housing could have been received) through the last pretreatment period of 2001–2005 (with outcomes observed in 2007). Comparison cases had to meet the ≤50% of AMI criterion for at least half of one 5-year period. If cases met the income criterion for more than one 5-year period, we chose the one that occurred earliest.
10. Data obtained from http://www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/pictures/about
11. The 675 children in the final sample exclude 42 children identified as Hispanic, Asian, or another race or ethnicity because the small N limits our ability to test for differences for these race and ethnic groups.
12. Unadjusted means. The median is provided for family income.
13. See the Technical Appendix for complete propensity model results.
14. The $344 is the regression-adjusted difference in child enrichment expenditures between treatment and comparison groups. Given a difference in total annual housing costs for housing assistance recipients of approximately $3,840 (i.e., average total housing cost of $6,146 for assistance recipients versus $9,999 for nonrecipients), this suggests that every $10 decrease in annual housing costs increases child enrichment expenditures by approximately $1. (See the Technical Appendix for details.)
15. Results shown are based on OLS. We also tested a negative binomial specification for the BPI because of its skew to zero and tested an ordered logit specification for health, which is measured using a 5-point ordinal scale. The results are similar to the OLS results shown here (see the Technical Appendix for results).
16. Results for the full set of outcomes are largely consistent with those reported in the text.
17. These estimates are based on predicted marginal probabilities. See the Technical Appendix.
18. Nearly 70% of children experienced no pretreatment years with a disabled head.
19. These results are fairly stable across models that include or exclude the measure of child enrichment expenditures, suggesting that the effect of the head’s disability does not operate through enrichment expenditures. Nor are there large differences in the fraction of children in the treatment and comparison groups who live in households where the head is disabled.
20. Panel B of shows results from outcome models estimating the effects of assisted housing on outcomes without enrichment expenditures. The effects of IV-predicted assisted housing on enrichment expenditures are shown in Table A2.
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Notes on contributors
Sandra Newman
Sandra Newman, PhD, is a professor of policy studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her current research focuses on the effects of attributes of the housing bundle on children and families.
C. Scott Holupka
C. Scott Holupka, PhD, is a senior research associate at the Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the relationship between housing, neighborhoods, families, and children.