Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) are used by over 2 million low-income families (totaling more than 5 million people) as forms of rental assistance. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) created housing vouchers to assist low-income, disabled and elderly individuals find housing in the private market. A family’s eligibility for vouchers is determined by their income and the median incomes and fair market rents in the area (75% of Public Housing Authority (PHA) vouchers are reserved for recipients whose income is less than 30% of the area median income). Voucher holders must pay 30% of their income to rent and utilities, and the government subsidizes the rest.
The voucher program is widely understood as a tool of economic mobility. The hallmark Moving to Opportunity project that took place from 1994 to 1998 offered vouchers to randomly selected families in high-poverty housing projects. Families that used the vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods were linked to improved college attendance rates and earnings for young children later in life. In the Family Options Study, a HUD random assignment experiment in 2010-2012 that compared the impact of four housing and services interventions for homeless families, housing choice vouchers led to the largest decreases in homelessness, crowding, and instability among families with children of the four programs.
In practice, however, the reality is different. Although HCV are a federally recognized, legitimate source of income, voucher recipients often face hurdles in search of housing: landlords are often reluctant to accept vouchers as payment, either rejecting the vouchers outright or making excuses to prospective tenants. In 2018, HUD conducted a study and found denial rates for vouchers can range from as high as 76-78% in Los Angeles, California and Fort Worth, Texas respectively, to as low as 15-30% in Washington, D.C. and Newark, New Jersey respectively. In response to this widespread problem, many cities, counties and states have passed “Source of Income Protection” (SOI) laws that outlaw landlords from rejecting potential renters based on their use of a voucher for rent payment. These non-discrimination laws have been found to increase the success rate of voucher use, but only protect about one-third of the households using vouchers nationwide. Though they are certainly not deterministic of increased positive outcomes for voucher holders (for instance, state and local enforcement may still be weak or nonexistent, and voucher holders may not be aware of their rights), these anti-discrimination measures are certainly an important step. Therefore, policymakers need more comprehensive knowledge about the nature of these anti-discrimination protections to assess the efficacy of such legislation.
Recognizing this need, Urban Institute produced a dataset in October 2020 to build a national picture of Source of Income protections, which contains information on 12 state laws, 87 city and county laws, and 1 law amendment passed between 1971 and 2019. Hereafter, I collectively refer to these 100 dataset observations as “laws.” The dataset only included laws that recognize housing choice vouchers as a protected income source, whether through “explicit mention, court interpretation, or enforcement by local agencies.” Urban Institute scored the laws based on how their features increase or decrease the effectiveness of their Source of Income Protections. The score categories were the laws’ explicit inclusion of vouchers, enforcement mechanisms, exemptions, and incentives for landlords.
The following timeline visualizes all the laws passed from 1971 to 2019. In the nearly 50 years analyzed, 71 out of the 100 laws were enacted from 1999 to 2019. For the laws passed in the first 22 years studied, most of the laws were state-level laws. Eight out of the twelve state-level SOI laws in place today were passed within the first 22 years, and the remaining four were passed within the last 6 years. In another interesting insight, passage of county-level laws was concentrated in the second half of the time period.
The success of the early surge in state laws between 1971 and 1993 was important because it set the tone for the later surge of cities and counties passing laws between 1993 and 2012, which vastly increased the number of protected voucher households across the country. A companion study by Urban Institute found that lawmakers in the states which passed statewide protections were mobilized by two main factors: advocacy by fair housing and tenants’ rights groups, and new evidence on the pervasiveness of discrimination against voucher holders.
Lau GPPR Data Story Viz 1 – final
Analysis of all the laws in the dataset also revealed an interesting difference between state and municipal action. For most states that passed a state-wide law, that was the only law they passed. On the other hand, many states with city-level laws only are more likely to have passed multiple of those over the years. Passing state-wide laws is a harder legislative lift, as reflected by their strength scores. The Urban Institute gave state-level laws higher average strength scores (2.2) than county laws (2.15) or city laws (1.85). City-level laws are “small wins” in politically receptive climates that only protect voucher beneficiaries within that city, whereas state-level protection laws are more difficult to achieve politically and therefore have a greater payoff: a blanket legislation that protects all voucher users across the state. This presents interesting opportunities for further analysis of the association between the presence (and strength) of a state or local voucher protection law, and rate of landlord voucher acceptance.
SOI laws aim to protect use of numerous sources of income, including other federal benefits such as Social Security and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). To analyze their effect on voucher use specifically, we can hone in on one of the features Urban Institute analyzed in the laws; whether they explicitly mentioned Housing Choice Vouchers. Theoretically, this should make SOI laws stronger because it makes court interpretation clearer and provides landlords with more incentive to accept vouchers.
Lau GPPR Data Story Viz 2_stacked(1)
What causes the disparity across states’ protections for voucher households? Policymakers and advocates may want to know why some locations enact regulations, while others do not. One possible answer is that jurisdictions with greater voucher-based need have passed some level of a voucher protection law. To assess this hypothesis, we can turn to the following visualization. The interactive visualization below pulls data from the HUD Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing dataset, designed to help localities understand housing need and racial disparities in their jurisdictions, to contextualize our working dataset.
It appears that most of the states with the highest proportions of HCV units, such as Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, and California, are covered by state SOI laws (with the exception of Louisiana). Some states, such as Oklahoma and Utah, are at the other end of the spectrum with the lowest proportions of HCV units but are still protected by state SOI laws. At the county and city level, the distance between need and protections is even more disjointed. The visualization reveals how voucher households across the country are covered by an uneven patchwork of source of income laws. The wide range in protections likely explains the variation in states’ voucher denial rates. Some states are receptive to voucher income, while others are not.
To improve the viability of housing choice vouchers as an effective and sustainable pathway to affordable housing, we need to understand what kind of Source of Income protection laws are most successful at combating voucher discrimination. Therefore, subsequent analysis should link various characteristics of SOI laws to voucher utilization rates and success rates. Does explicitly mentioning HCVs as protected income sources in the law increase the success rate? What kind of enforcement mechanisms make a voucher more or less likely to be accepted by a landlord? When coupled with the current findings, these insights will inform how policymakers should standardize policies across localities and states to promote safe and successful environments for housing choice voucher holders. Going a step further, some advocates have called for a federal Source of Income law to establish a consistent standard of protection for voucher holders, especially in states unlikely to pass such legislation on their own. The fact remains that for housing vouchers to fulfill their potential as vehicles of economic mobility, stronger and more consistent legislation is needed to protect and encourage those who use them to seek housing.
