Segmented Information, Segregated Outcomes: Housing Affordability and Neighborhood Representation on a Voucher-Focused Online Housing Platform and Three Mainstream Alternatives

Abstract

Online platforms have become an integral component of the housing search process in the United States and other developed contexts, but recent studies have demonstrated that these platforms offer uneven representation of different neighborhoods. In this study, we use listings covering the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas to assess how GoSection8, a platform uniquely focused on affordable housing and voucher-assisted households, compares with the “mainstream” alternatives of Craigslist, Apartments.com, and Zillow. Through descriptive and regression analyses of the housing and neighborhoods represented on these websites and a new way of measuring the distribution of rental housing opportunities, we advance a multisource perspective on the role of online information exchanges in housing search processes. Specifically, we find that GoSection8 and mainstream alternatives capture spatially segmented information about housing markets, with GoSection8 ads representing units that are more affordable but also more constrained to higher-poverty neighborhoods where assisted households are already concentrated. The findings suggest that disadvantaged households are potentially funneled toward high-poverty, isolated neighborhoods by the operation of stratified information systems available for online housing searches.

Keywords:

• Housing platforms
• residential segregation
• neighborhood stratification
• housing search
• housing policy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As of September 2021, the website has rebranded itself as AffordableHousing.com.

2 Source-of-income protections require landlords to rent to qualified applicants regardless of where their income comes from, including vouchers, although there are many variations across jurisdictions in the scope of protections offered to renters. See Tighe et al. (2017) for a review of source-of-income discrimination laws.

3 Appendix C compares the characteristics of neighborhoods that are over/underrepresented on the four platforms using these two different reference distributions, and we detect limited substantive differences in our results related to patterns of neighborhood representation of GoSection8 and the comparison platforms.

4 The American Community Survey counts for renter-occupied housing units by monthly cash rent paid are binned, like many detailed American Community Survey counts (e.g., household income) published for small areas like census tracts. We use the lower bound of the American Community Survey bin to define whether the rents paid by households in the relevant bin were below Fair Market Rent. Because one could reasonably use the upper bound as an alternative, we tested our results under this specification using the upper bin value and found no substantive difference.

5 The dissimilarity index measures the share of a group’s population that would need to move for each tract to have the same percentage of that group as the metropolitan region overall. It ranges from 0 (complete integration) to 1 (complete segregation).

Additional information

Funding

Partial support for this research came from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant [P2C HD042828] and training grant [T32 HD101442-01] to the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology at the University of Washington.

Notes on contributors

Chris Hess

Chris Hess is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on residential segregation, housing inequalities and applying demographic methods to heterogeneous data.

Rebecca J. Walter

Rebecca J. Walter is an Associate Professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington. Her research is focused on policy innovation in low-income housing and spatial-temporal crime patterns across various types of land uses, housing developments, and commercial real estate.

Ian Kennedy

Ian Kennedy graduated with their PhD from the University of Washington’s Sociology department in 2022. They also hold masters degrees in Sociology, from the University of Washington, and in Experimental Humanities, from New York University. They are currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Rice University.

Arthur Acolin

Arthur Acolin is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. His research focuses on access to housing and developing new tools to support equitable urban growth.

Alex Ramiller

Alex Ramiller is a PhD student in City and Regional Planning at the University of California Berkeley, studying residential mobility, housing markets, and local housing policy.

Kyle Crowder

Kyle Crowder is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the processes of residential differentiation and the effects of physical and social context on individual life conditions.