A new study by Kirk McClure and Alex Schwartz explores mobility in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, with a special focus on Latino households. The study, “Movement Toward High Opportunity and Racial and Ethnic Integration for Hispanics in the Housing Choice Voucher Program,” finds that Latino HCV households are concentrated in low opportunity and predominantly Latino census tracts. Only some Latino HCV households who move with their vouchers move to higher opportunity or ethnically-integrated census tracts. The largest share of Latino HCV households who move while in the program move to predominantly Latino census tracts or to census tracts of the same opportunity level. These patterns suggest the need to improve mobility outcomes for Latino HCV holders.
McClure and Schwartz used HUD’s Longitudinal Household Data from 2010 to 2017 to track HCV household moves between census tracts, and the developed an index to measure neighborhood opportunity using census tract data from HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) initiative. The neighborhood opportunity index included variables for poverty, employment, and school quality, which were used to rank census tracts as very low, low, moderate, high, or very high in opportunity. The authors used American Community Survey data to measure the racial and ethnic composition of census tracts and explore patterns of residential segregation within the HCV program.
Latinos accounted for 16% of HCV households in 2017, comparable to their 15% share of the voucher-eligible population. Non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic Blacks accounted for 33% and 47% of HCV households, respectively. While sixty-nine percent of all HCV households lived in low- or very low-opportunity census tracts in 2017, rates varied substantially by race and ethnicity. Both Latino (76%) and non-Latino Black (78%) voucher holders were more likely to live in low-opportunity neighborhoods than non-Hispanic whites (53%). At 51%, Latino HCV households were more likely than any other racial or ethnic minority group to reside in a census tract where their group predominates and the least likely (34%) to live in an integrated census tract.
Approximately 47% of HCV households moved to a different census tract during the eight year study period, but this varied by race and ethnicity. Latino households (45%) were less likely to move than non-Latino Black households (54%) and more likely to move than non-Latino white households (38%). Among all HCV households that moved, 43% remained in census tracts with the same level of opportunity, while 31% moved to a higher opportunity tract and 26% moved to a lower opportunity tract. Latino HCV households followed a nearly identical pattern.
Forty-three percent of all HCV movers relocated to census tracts where their own racial or ethnic group predominated, while 41% moved to integrated tracts and 16% moved to tracts where another group was predominant. Forty-eight percent of Latino HCV movers relocated to predominantly Latino census tracts. Latino HCV movers (37%) were least likely to move to an integrated census tract compared to non-Latino Black (42%) and non-Hispanic white (39%) movers. Just 15% of Latino HCV movers relocated to census tracts where another racial or ethnic group predominated.
McClure and Schwartz conclude the HCV program has greater potential to promote desegregation and access to higher opportunity neighborhoods for Black and Latino households. The authors argue reforms are needed to realize this potential such as Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs), mobility counseling, and greater resources for landlord recruitment. Households for whom English is a second language, including some Latino households, could particularly benefit from the housing search assistance typically included in mobility counseling programs.
Read the study at: https://bit.ly/3qO77y7