Whom Do We Serve? Refining Public Housing Agency Service Areas

Kristen Tauber
Ingrid Gould Ellen
Katherine O’Regan
NYU Wagner School and Furman Center

Knowing public housing authority/agency (PHA) service areas is important for understanding the neighborhoods that housing choice voucher holders can most easily reach and for evaluating programmatic reforms and new laws. However, no centralized database on PHA service areas exists, and the information is not always available on PHA websites. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has developed a set of estimated service areas, but they often differ significantly from areas reported on individual PHA websites or fail to capture a large share of voucher activity. In this article, the authors provide a new methodology for improving the coverage of HUD estimated service areas.