A different lens: administrative perspectives on portability in Illinois' Housing Choice Voucher Program

Abstract

Over the last decade, the Housing Choice Voucher Program has grown to become the USA's primary strategy for providing safe, decent, and affordable housing. Annually serving more than 2 million low-income households, the program is designed to help low-income households afford private market rental housing. The program also allows for the “portability” of vouchers nationally between housing authority jurisdictions. Both features aim to mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty. Research on the Moving to Opportunity Program and the Gautreaux consent decree have produced data confirming that residential mobility can at times lead to positive opportunities for assisted households. This past research has been conducted on specific programs occurring outside of the general Housing Choice Voucher Program framework and has focused on household-level outcomes, paying little attention to the ways in which program administration may affect outcomes for voucher households. This article aims to understand voucher portability from the perspective of housing authority executive directors and program administrators, in order to better understand how program administration impacts the types of household outcomes observed in prior research. The results reveal that housing authority administrative practices and inter-housing authority relationships play a significant role in shaping the types of outcomes realized by porting voucher households. These findings suggest several changes to program administrative design and policy that may improve support for voucher households as they make portability moves.

Keywords:

• low-income housing
• vouchers
• mobility
• HUD

Notes

¹These numbers come from the September 2010 HUD IMS-PIC Resident Characteristics Report, and reflect program numbers including rental and homeownership, and project-based vouchers.

²Including households who left the program during this time period.

³The demonstration's operational definition of opportunity areas were those with a household poverty rate of less than 10 percent.

⁴A similar phenomenon was observed amongst many of the households that participated in the Gautreaux Consent Decree in Chicago, which moved families from public housing to racially integrated communities throughout the Chicagoland area in the 1980s and 1990s. See in particular Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum (2000).

⁵Unlike this study, which is focused on portability only within the state of Illinois, all past studies using this methodology have focused on analyzing and aggregating the characteristics of portability movers at the national level.

⁶Many participants in the Section 8 certificate program transitioned to housing vouchers during the course of this study. Those program participants who only used certificates but did not participate at all in the voucher program over the course of this study (a total of 5,095 households) were eliminated from analysis. Longitudinal data on participants who transitioned from certificate-based assistance to voucher-based assistance (a total of 16,928 households) were included in analysis.

⁷As part of the purposive sampling strategy utilized in this research, I attempted to interview not only high-level program directors and administrators, but also managers who were performing day-to-day case management and client intake work. Of the 11 HCV program administrators interviewed, seven could be classified as having day-to-day client case management responsibilities. The remainder of such officials had oversight responsibilities for the PHA's HCV Program, but reported directly to the PHA executive director.

⁸Under portability billing, housing authorities administering portable vouchers split the HUD-appropriated administrative fee for the voucher. In most cases, administering housing authorities receive 80 percent of the administrative fee, while the sending housing authority retains 20 percent of the voucher's administrative fee.

⁹Federal program regulations allow assisted households to pay up to 40 percent of their income towards rent, although housing assistance payments will cover up to only 30 percent of the difference between the fair market rent of a unit and the tenants' income. Allowing tenants to pay more than the 30 percent standard in rent affords some flexibility in leasing up in a unit that is more costly than what the voucher subsidy will cover; however, the household cannot lease up in a unit with rent that exceeds the housing assistance payment plus 40 percent of the household's income.

¹⁰This is being conducted by the author as part of a HUD Dissertation Research Grant.