Employment Accessibility Among Housing Subsidy Recipients

Abstract

This article estimates the extent to which different types of subsidized households live near employment, measuring the extent of spatial mismatch between these households and employment. Using census tract–level data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on housing subsidy locations and employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this article uses a distance-decay function to estimate job-accessibility indices for census tracts in metropolitan statistical areas with 100,000 people or more. I use these data to create weighted job-accessibility indices for housing subsidy recipients (public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Section 8 New Construction, and housing voucher households) and the total population and renter households earning below 50% of area median income as points of comparison. I find that of all these groups, by a large margin, public housing households live in census tracts with the greatest proximity to low-skilled jobs. However, they also live among the greatest concentration of individuals who compete for those jobs, namely, the low-skilled unemployed. These findings suggest that we pay close attention to the trade-offs that public housing residents are making as these units are demolished and replaced with vouchers.

Keywords::

• public housing
• spatial mismatch
• vouchers
• low-income housing
• labor markets

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the UCLA Faculty Senate Council on Research for generous funding. C.J. Gabbe and Chhandara Pech provided excellent research assistance. Evy Blumenberg and Michael Smart generously provided travel-time data. I also thank Paul Ong, Qing Shen, several conference participants, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. All errors are my own.

Notes

^1. In fact, work on the spatial mismatch hypothesis is so extensive that it makes little sense to attempt a full review here. For such reviews, see Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist (1998) and Kain (1992, 2004).

^2. The NHPD contains expiration dates for subsidies such as the LIHTC and Section 8 New Construction, which are important for keeping subsidized housing data up to date (PAHRC & NLIHC, 2013).

^3. Parks (2004) empirically estimated this parameter using household-level data on employment and residential locations for low-skilled females and arrived at an estimate of − 0.058. With that, her estimate weighs jobs at distance k from tract i by 0 minutes = 1, 5 minutes = 0.75, 10 minutes = 0.56, and 20 minutes = 0.31. Using national surveys, I estimate the distance-to-time ratio for commuting as approximately 3 to 1. That is, roughly the same proportion of people work 15 minutes away that work 5 miles away; 30 minutes corresponds to 10 miles; etc. Thus, I arrived at a decay parameter of − 0.058 ×  3 = − 0.174, where 0 miles = 1, 3 miles = 0.59, 5 miles = 0.42, 15 miles = 0.07, 30 miles = 0.005, and 50 miles = 0.0002. Only jobs within 50 miles are included.

^4. For these cities, researchers had already applied the time-intensive methodology developed by Ozimek and Miles for a study on cities that served as Moving to Opportunity and Welfare to Work Vouchers sites and generously provided these estimates to the author.

^5. Table A7 displays this by summarizing the distance-weighted numbers of job openings, low-skilled unemployed, and labor-force members for the total population and each subgroup. These results show that public housing households live near 78% more low-skilled unemployed than the total population does, 32% more job openings, and 16% fewer members of the labor force.

This article is the 2013–2014 Housing Policy Debate Paper Competition winner.