AHS Voucher Coverage (was AHS 2015 Geographic Coverage)

The American Housing Survey has a two ways to identify households receiving Housing Choice Vouchers, neither of which is entirely satisfactory.

The first method is self-identification: we ask the respondents a series of questions and use their answers to determine their assistance status. However, housing assistance programs are complicated and unfamiliar to most respondents. Because of this, the accuracy of the responses is not as good as we would like.

The second method, which we began using in the 2011 survey, is to match AHS addresses with HUD administrative records. We believe that assisted units identified this way are more reliable. However, there are differences in the way that HUD and the Census Bureau record addresses, and this means that some HUD records cannot be matched to the Census Bureau’s Master Address File. The result is that some assisted units in the AHS are not matched to HUD records.

There are variables on the AHS public use file that show the results of both of these identification methods. Judicious use of these variables can reveal the conditions of the housing units occupied by voucher recipients.

We continue to work on better ways to identify assistance in the AHS sample.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development
451 7th Street SW, Room 8222
Washington, DC 20410

Email david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov
Phone 202-402-5890

From: AHS [mailto:ahs@huduser.gov]
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 4:05 PM
To: Vandenbroucke, David A
Subject:AHS 2015 Geographic Coverage (was RE: Time is Running Out to Make Your Voice Heard)

Do you have information that correlates HCV renters to dwellings?

Ed Ware
eware@nrha.us