Landlords and Housing Vouchers: 50 Years of Feedback

Philip M.E. Garboden
The University of Chicago

Eva Rosen
Georgetown University

Isaiah Fleming-Klink
University College London

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program relies on the willing participation of landlords to succeed. Since the program’s earliest days, policymakers have been concerned with understanding how landlords think about and respond to the program’s complex bundle of costs and benefits. The literature on landlord participation in the HCV program in the 1970s and early 1980s was designed to assess the feasibility of a voucher program for housing. These reports typically used attitudinal survey data from landlords, providing the earliest information on how landlords viewed a housing voucher program. More recently, trends in voucher success rates, search durations, and discrimination reignited interest in the topic, leading to a series of studies that wrestled with the question of landlord nonparticipation. Across those accounts, landlord frustrations are more about how the rules are administered than the actual rules. These themes highlight the importance of understanding what landlords think about the program so that policymakers can develop more effective strategies to improve it. This article concludes by encouraging practitioners and researchers to focus attention on implementation and administrative capacity within public housing authorities, which can improve landlord experience while not jeopardizing tenant outcomes.