Evaluating the RAD Choice Mobility Option: Part 1: Prevalence

Evaluating the RAD Choice Mobility Option: Part 1: Prevalence

This article is the first in a three-part series discussing the findings of the 2023 report “Evaluation of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD): Implementation and Impact of the Choice Mobility Option.” This article will review the Choice Mobility Option and findings about its prevalence among RAD eligible residents. The next two articles will focus on the experiences of residents, PHA staff, and property owners with the Choice Mobility Option.

In 2012, Congress authorized the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program to address the large capital improvement needs of public housing properties. Through one of RAD's components, public housing agencies (PHAs) convert properties from traditional public housing to project-based Section 8 Housing Assistance Payments contracts, either through project-based voucher (PBV) or project-based rental assistance (PBRA) contracts. Converted properties benefit from increased access to commonly used financing tools that support affordable housing development, helping preserve their long-term affordability. 

To improve public housing residents' ability to access affordable housing that best meets their needs, HUD extended the Choice Mobility option to all properties converted through RAD. Choice Mobility allows residents of RAD properties to request a tenant-based (rather than project-based) housing choice voucher (HCV), enabling them to move to a housing unit on the private rental market as their housing needs change. This option originates from the "Family Right to Move" of the PBV program. By extending this mobility right to PBRA residents, Choice Mobility ensures that all RAD residents have the option to move while retaining housing assistance regardless of the program selected for the RAD conversion. Although households opting to make a Choice Mobility request do not receive a voucher immediately, the requesting household gets priority placement on the PHA's HCV waiting list; when the household successfully leases a new unit with the voucher and moves out of the RAD property, their old unit, along with its project-based rental subsidy, becomes available to a new assisted household.

The 2023 "Evaluation of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD): Implementation and Impact of the Choice Mobility Option" report is the first study to quantify the use of the Choice Mobility option and to assess the experiences and outcomes of residents, PHAs, and property owners.

Findings From the 2019 RAD Evaluation

HUD completed a previous evaluation of RAD in 2019 that focused on whether RAD was achieving its affordable housing preservation goals and assessed stakeholder experiences of the RAD conversion. The evaluation included a survey of RAD property residents that found that 49 percent of residents were unaware of the Choice Mobility option, with nearly the same share of respondents indicating some level of interest in relocating rather than remaining in their current units. Because HUD had no information about the share of eligible RAD residents who moved with the Choice Mobility option, this question became a primary focus of the followup evaluation of RAD. The evaluation also was more relevant because RAD had matured since 2019 and more RAD residents were eligible for the Choice Mobility option. 

Description of Quantitative Study Data for the 2023 Report

Researchers collected data for this evaluation from several sources, including HUD administrative data; RAD Notices and other documents on Choice Mobility; virtual site visits consisting of interviews with PHA staff, property owners, managers, and residents; surveys distributed to the same groups; and publicly available data on neighborhood characteristics and local housing market conditions.

Before conducting interviews or distributing surveys, researchers used HUD administrative data, which provide the most comprehensive means to track households over time, to create a sample of households eligible for and using Choice Mobility. Researchers primarily relied on two longitudinal datasets, the Inventory Management System/Public and Indian Housing Information Center (IMS/PIC) and the Tenant Rental Assistance Certification System.

These datasets presented some challenges for researchers. For example, PIC data record unique property codes of households in public housing, but such codes are not reported for PBV households, including households in RAD-converted properties, which complicated efforts to determine which PBV households were living in a RAD property and were eligible for Choice Mobility. In addition, PIC does not explicitly record a Choice Mobility move for RAD PBV households, in contrast to RAD PBRA households, whose Choice Mobility moves are captured in a special code.

The research team used property-level, RAD conversion-level, and household-level datasets and began by cleaning and preparing the data to identify eligible and noneligible residents for the Choice Mobility option and those who moved using the option. This process resulted in a dataset of eligible choice mobility movers that, as of September 2021, consisted of 46,333 households estimated to be living in 584 RAD PBV properties and 59,619 households living in 343 RAD PBRA properties. By the third quarter of 2021, 79 percent of all RAD PBV tenants and 41 percent of all RAD PBRA tenants were eligible for the Choice Mobility option.

Usage of the Choice Mobility Option

Researchers found that a relatively small share of eligible residents elect to use the Choice Mobility option. In 2021, the study estimates that 1.7 percent of eligible households in RAD PBV properties moved using Choice Mobility, and 0.8 percent of eligible households in RAD PBRA properties moved using Choice Mobility. In comparison, 1.4 percent of non-RAD PBV families moved with the "Family Right to Move" option in 2021, somewhat lower than RAD PBV Choice Mobility use, but higher than RAD PBRA Choice Mobility use.

Among 180 surveyed RAD PHAs, those with PBRA conversions reported receiving 497 Choice Mobility requests from 10,280 eligible residents (4.8 percent) in 2019, those with PBV conversions reported receiving 993 Choice Mobility requests from 15,543 eligible residents (6.4 percent), and those with non-RAD PBVs reported receiving 1,256 "Family Right to Move" requests from 8,885 residents (14.1 percent). Low uptake meant that most RAD PHAs reported being able to fulfill Choice Mobility voucher requests.

Administrative data, in combination with survey data and external data from sources such as the American Community Survey and the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing dataset, also helped reveal characteristics of households opting for the Choice Mobility option. Households that moved were more likely to be Black, younger, have more members, and less likely to have a disability compared with nonmover households. Researchers detected no significant difference in income levels between movers and nonmovers. Market conditions also influenced moves; PHAs in markets with higher rental vacancy rates saw lower levels of Choice Mobility requests but higher levels of successful lease-ups. Areas with higher numbers of jobs accessible to low-income people of color also saw higher levels of Choice Mobility requests but lower levels of successful lease-ups.

The next two articles in this series will focus on the experiences of residents living in properties undergoing a RAD conversion and the experiences of PHAs and RAD property owners concerning the impact of Choice Mobility on their operations.