Comment on Bruce J. Katz and Margery Austin Turner's “who should run the housing voucher program? A reform proposal”

Abstract

Increasingly, public housing authorities (PHAs) in general and the tenant‐based Section 8 voucher program in particular are seen as the means to promote mixed‐income communities and the deconcentration of poverty. Katz and Turner contend that the current fragmented system, consisting of thousands of local PHAs, undermines the potential of the voucher program to achieve these goals.

While Katz and Turner's proposal for regional administration and privatization is an earnest look at the future of PHAs and Section 8, we are not convinced that their proposal will address the causes of concentrated poverty. Assessing the validity of these arguments will require much work before their hypotheses are translated into overly deterministic “solutions” for the complex, multifaceted problems of spatial concentration of poverty and limited access to affordable housing across the metropolitan area.

Keywords:

• Low‐income housing
• Mobility
• Neighborhood