Revealing how scarcity shapes housing outcomes for the poorest renters
The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program provides rental assistance to more than two million households in the United States. However, unlike many other forms of federal assistance aimed at reducing social inequality and ending poverty, the voucher program is not an entitlement program. Scarce housing resources shape the ways that public housing agencies (PHAs) administer the program and impact the housing outcomes for the poorest renters.
Drawing primarily on interviews at more than fifty housing authorities, I look at on-the-ground rules and practices behind the voucher program, including how housing authorities craft waitlists, set local priorities and select voucher recipients from their lists. In a recent paper in the American Sociological Review, I show how administrative decisions made by PHAs create successive opportunities for state agencies to govern the poor through a tripartite process of selecting market-ready households, engaging them in rituals of market formation, and utilizing market nudges to remind them of their responsibilities as market actors. I am currently completing a book about scarcity in the program, The Voucher Lottery: How the Scarcity of Rental Assistance Shapes Housing Outcomes for the Poorest Americans.