Using Administrative Data for Spatial and Longitudinal Analysis of the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Eric Schultheis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Gregory Russ, Carolina Lucey, Cambridge Housing Authority

Data Shop

Data Shop, a department of Cityscape, presents short articles or notes on the uses of data in housing and urban research. Through this department, the Office of Policy Development and Research introduces readers to new and overlooked data sources and to improved techniques in using well-known data. The emphasis is on sources and methods that analysts can use in their own work. Researchers often run into knotty data problems involving data interpretation or manipulation that must be solved before a project can proceed, but they seldom get to focus in detail on the solutions to such problems. If you have an idea for an applied, data-centric note of no more than 3,000 words, please send a one-paragraph abstract to david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov for consideration.

Place and time are important dimensions of the administration of and policy behind the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP). Spatial and longitudinal analyses of the HCVP are rare, however. In part, this scarcity is because of the lack of widely available, microscale spatial and temporal HCVP data. This article introduces a process that researchers and public housing authorities (PHAs) can use to generate a spatially located, person-period data set of participant households in the HCVP, using off-the-shelf software and administrative data that HUD requires PHAs to collect via Form HUD-50058. This spatially located, person-period data set enables researchers and PHAs to conduct a variety of longitudinal and microscale spatial analyses not possible using untransformed 50058 data or other widely available data sources.