Skip to main content

Evaluation of the Community Choice Demonstration

HUD.GOV HUDUser.gov
Evaluation of the Community Choice Demonstration


Overview

Recent research has shown that the quality of neighborhoods can significantly affect a child’s future earnings and educational attainment. This research is based on an earlier demonstration, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Demonstration, launched in 1994, that tested the effects on public housing residents living in high-poverty areas of being offered a voucher that could only be used in a low-poverty area. While MTO generated important evidence about the potential effects of neighborhood on child and adult outcomes, it did not assess the most effective approach to shape the locational outcomes of voucher participants. Recent programs developed by local jurisdictions, such as Baltimore, Seattle and King County, Washington, are testing mobility-related services and assessing their effectiveness. The early findings from these studies have been promising, but it is not clear if results in those local jurisdictions can be replicated more broadly in agencies of different sizes and operating in different rental market conditions.

The Community Choice Demonstration (previously known as the Housing Choice Voucher Mobility Demonstration) is a large-scale, multi-site randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test and evaluate the effectiveness of providing voucher assistance and mobility-related services to families with children to encourage such families to move to lower-poverty areas and expand access to opportunity areas. A total of 10 public housing agencies (PHAs) at eight sites across the United States participate in the Demonstration. These agencies were selected through a competitive process administered by HUD. These agencies and their partners are aiming to offer mobility-related services to approximately 9,400 families with children participating in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program over six years, beginning in August 2022 and ending in October 2028. More information on the Demonstration is available on HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing website.

The Demonstration will study the effects of two interventions:

  • The first intervention, Comprehensive Mobility-Related Services (CMRS), will provide a comprehensive set of services that aims to address all of the principal obstacles that HCV participants experience accessing lower-poverty areas, including financial barriers, knowledge and skill gaps, hesitancy on the part of families to move to opportunity areas, hesitancy on the part of property owners in opportunity areas to participate in the HCV program, and challenges that affect families’ ability to stay in opportunity areas once there.
  • The second intervention, Selected Mobility-Related Services (SMRS), will test up to three smaller bundles of services selected from the broader CMRS suite to determine whether they can effectively assist families in accessing opportunity areas at a lower cost.

The Demonstration has two main phases:

  • Phase 1 consists of a Planning Period, a six- to nine-month Pilot, and 18–20 months of implementation after the Pilot (August 2022 to September 2024). In Phase 1, families who enroll in the Demonstration will be randomly selected either to be offered CMRS or the control condition.
  • Phase 2 consists of a three-month Pilot and about four years of implementation after the Pilot (October 2024 to September 2028). In Phase 2, there will be three-way random assignment with different treatment groups of families offered CMRS and SMRS, along with a control group.

The confirmatory research questions for the first phase of the Demonstration focus on the effects of CMRS on the families who move to an opportunity area and the duration of residency in an opportunity area. The study will also assess the impacts of being offered CMRS on a range of secondary outcomes, such as the share of new voucher recipients who use their vouchers to find a unit (in any location) and the share of existing voucher families who move (to any location). In addition, the study will examine which services appear most effective in facilitating moves to an opportunity area and the site- and household-level factors that affect the likelihood that a family moves to an opportunity area. The second phase of the Demonstration will examine the impacts of SMRS on these same outcomes as well as compare CMRS and SMRS.

Finally, this study will lay the groundwork for examining whether the offer of mobility-related services leads to improvements in child or adult health, education, and economic mobility outcomes. These outcomes will take time to emerge and will be studied in future phases of this research.

Reports published by HUD to date include:

  • Research Design, Data Collection and Analysis Plan (January 2023) that describes in detail the elements of the intervention, the study’s implementation approach and support of PHAs in Phase 1, the mixed-methods evaluation strategy (including the Process, Impact, and Cost Studies), the preparations for Phase 2 research and beyond, and data security measures.

All products generated from this study will be housed on this project page. For additional information, please contact Marina Myhre at marina.l.myhre@hud.gov or Teresa Souza at teresa.souza@hud.gov.

Research Design

The objective of the Community Choice Demonstration is to build rigorous evidence on how to advance the long-held goals of expanding residential choice and facilitating moves to opportunity areas by families with children participating in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. This rigorous multi-site experiment will test two types of interventions.

  • The first intervention, Comprehensive Mobility-Related Services (CMRS), will provide a comprehensive set of services that aims to address all of the principal obstacles that HCV participants experience accessing lower-poverty areas.
  • The second intervention, Selected Mobility-Related Services (SMRS), will test up to three smaller bundles of services selected from the broader CMRS to determine whether they can effectively assist families in accessing opportunity areas at a lower cost.

The confirmatory research questions for the first phase of the Demonstration focus on the effects of being offered CMRS on the share of families who move to an opportunity area and the duration of residency in an opportunity area. The second phase of the Demonstration will examine the impacts of SMRS on these same outcomes as well as the contrast between CMRS and SMRS. The research design provides a blueprint for the study implementation, including: the elements of the intervention, the study’s implementation approach and support of PHAs in Phase 1, the mixed-methods evaluation strategy (including the Process, Impact, and Cost Studies), the preparations for Phase 2 research and beyond, and data security measures.

Download the Research Design, Data Collection, and Analysis Plan (January 2023)

Reports

The evaluation of the Community Choice Demonstration will initially produce two major reports:

  • The Rapid Cycle Evaluation Report will assess which services within the Comprehensive Mobility-Related Services (CMRS) appear most cost-effective and important for generating opportunity moves, based on initial outcomes data and perceptions from public housing agency (PHA) staff, mobility services staff, landlords, and participating families. It will recommend specific Selected Mobility-Related Services (SMRS)to test in Phase 2 of the Demonstration. This report is expected to be published in early 2025.
  • The Phase 1 Process and Impact Evaluation Report will integrate the results of the Process, Impact, and Cost analyses for the first two and half years of the Demonstration’s implementation after the Phase 1 Pilot. The report will summarize findings on the effect of CMRS on moves to opportunity areas, the fidelity of implementation and implementation challenges, and the effectiveness and costs of the components of CMRS. This report is expected to be published in early 2026.

Data

As the evaluation progresses, HUD expects to publish a public use data file that provides a limited amount of information about the study sample, the CMRS implemented, and the documented outcomes. This file should allow for some simple analysis by outside researchers. In addition, HUD expects to create a restricted access data file available to qualified researchers in government, academic, non-profit, and not-for-profit organizations. The RAF will include greater geographic detail as well as details about household members. To use the RAF, researchers will propose to answer a relevant research question(s) that can be only be answered by restricted use CCD data. The RAF will not be directly available from HUD, rather researchers will request access to the RAF through a Federal Statistical Research Data Center operated by the U.S. Census Bureau. All proposals submitted to the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies must be approved by HUD. HUD will update the CCD webpage with more detailed information about these data files at the end of the first phase of the study (September 2026) and again at the end of the second phase of the study (September 2031).