Comparing Households in HUD Rental Assistance Programs With PUMS Data

Brent D. Mast
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

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.

In February 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched a new Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) database, which contains household-level data for 5 percent of households in five of HUD’s largest rental assistance programs. PUMS includes household characteristics as well as geographic information, enabling researchers to perform analyses not possible using other datasets.