Vouchers and Neighborhood Distress: The Unrealized Potential for Families With Housing Choice Vouchers To Reside in Neighborhoods With Low Levels of Distress

Alex Schwartz
The New School

Kirk McClure
University of Kansas

Lydia B. Taghavi
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

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The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the official positions or policies of the Office of Policy Development and Research, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or the U.S. government.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program seeks to help poor households locate in high-opportunity neighborhoods, but experts have reached little agreement on how to define high opportunity. Using low poverty as the sole criterion has proven ineffective. We offer an alternative metric to assess the level of distress in neighborhoods using multiple measures of neighborhood condition. With this new metric, we examine the extent to which female-headed families with children who have housing choice vouchers reside in census tracts with varying levels of distress by comparison with the availability of affordable rental housing. We find that HCV families are underrepresented in the least-distressed neighborhoods. The problem is especially acute among Black and Hispanic households.