This report examines the effect of experimental housing allowance programs on the residential location of households enrolled in the Housing Allowance Demand Experiment. Specific neighborhood characteristics considered are concentration of low-income households and of minority households in the households' Census tracts. Changes are also described using other measures of neighborhood quality such as crime rates and a neighborhood hedonic index.

The analysis of program effects is limited and, in some cases, sharply curtailed by small sample sizes. The overall finding is that the housing allowance did not induce households to choose neighborhoods with significantly different economic and racial/ethnic compositions from those they would have chosen in the absence of a program. The lack of any substantial effect from the allowance programs on racial concentration is consistent with the general lack of any strong association between racial segregation and household income. Likewise, cross-sectional analysis suggests that the changes in housing expenditures engendered by the allowance would not normally be expected to result in any substant1al change 10 the low-income concentration of tracts selected by recipients.

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This report is part of the collection of scanned historical documents available to the public.