Study Explores How Housing Choice Voucher Recipients Navigate Negative Stereotypes During their Housing Search  

By Mackenzie Pish, NLIHC Research Analyst 

A recently published article in Social Service Review, “‘I Don’t Fit the Stereotypes’: Housing Choice Voucher Recipients and the Navigation of a Voucher Identity,” examines how Housing Choice Voucher (HCV, or Section 8) Program participants experienced and navigated stigma during their search for rental housing in Honolulu, Hawaii. The authors found that as voucher holders struggled to find suitable rental units that would accept their vouchers, they tended to adopt the negative stereotypes about voucher holders as a group while describing themselves as exceptions. They suggest that this phenomenon results from the hyper-competitive nature of finding a rental home with a voucher, as well as the lack of opportunities to build solidarity movements among voucher-holding renters.  

HCVs are a critical resource for helping lower-income renter households become stably housed in neighborhoods of their choice. However, federal funding for housing subsidies is woefully inadequate to meet the demand for assistance, and as a result, many HCV applicants remain on a waitlist for years. The authors note that even after being awarded a voucher, an estimated 40% of households struggle to secure a lease for a rental home (also known as “leasing up”) within the allotted time frame and ultimately lose their voucher, largely due to an ongoing deficit of affordable, available rental housing and landlord refusal to rent to voucher holders.  

The authors sought to understand how individuals pulled from the HCV waitlist navigate the stigma and challenges associated with leasing up. They conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 47 individuals who were issued a voucher from the City and County of Honolulu Department of Community Services (DCS) in early 2020. The initial interviews were conducted as soon as possible after the required HCV program orientation led by DCS. Follow-up interviews focused on participants’ housing searches were conducted biweekly, and a final exit interview was conducted after participants either secured a lease or forfeited their vouchers because they were unable to lease up in the allotted time. Ultimately, 28 participants successfully used their voucher to secure housing and six lost their vouchers; the authors lost contact with the 13 remaining participants before the end of the study.   

The interviews revealed that, upon being pulled from the waitlist, HCV participants initially expressed confidence in their ability to lease up and hope that the voucher would provide “an opportunity to shed the negative valuations of their worth associated with…identities like ‘homeless’ or ‘public housing resident.’” The authors referred to this period as the “opportunity stage,” and found that participants rarely spoke about negative stigmas related to the program or participants. 

However, within 60 to 120 days after being pulled from the HCV waitlist, participants entered into what the authors refer to as the “rejection stage” as they struggled to lease up and were subjected to the stigmas associated with voucher holders. In follow-up interviews focused on their housing search, participants shared how disheartening and frustrating it was to encounter repeated rejections from landlords, property managers, and even advertisements for rental homes that explicitly stated that voucher holders would not be accepted. For example, one participant who ultimately leased up shared that she likely sent “more than 100 inquires” to find a unit that would accept her voucher.   

The authors found that in interviews conducted during the rejection stage, participants continued to emphasize their deservingness of a voucher. However, rather than describing the negative stereotypes associated with voucher holders as inaccurate, nearly all participants generally expressed acceptance of the stereotypes as true for most voucher recipients while describing themselves as an exception. Participants frequently described themselves as clean, educated, upstanding tenants—in sharp contrast to “others” in the program who were dirty, “illiterate,” and irresponsible. The authors note that, by distinguishing themselves from “other” voucher recipients, the participants legitimatized these negative stereotypes.  

The authors hypothesize that the exceptionalism and perpetuation of negative stereotypes seen among the study participants are a result of the extreme shortage of affordable, available housing units that will accept voucher-holding tenants. This shortage pits voucher holders against one another in a highly competitive and deeply demoralizing housing search. They also emphasize that the nature of the HCV program itself, as compared to other forms of assistance like public housing, makes it difficult for voucher holders to organize solidarity movements and build power through collective action. According to the authors, policy interventions should focus “first and foremost” on increasing the supply of safe, affordable rental units. They also propose bureaucratic reforms to the HCV program to help make vouchers more palatable to landlords, as well as the implementation of source-of-income discrimination protections that prohibit landlords from rejecting otherwise qualified renters simply for being voucher holders.  

Read the article at: https://bit.ly/40GS3ow