Subsidized Housing and the Concentration of Poverty: A Case Study of Eight American Cities

Yana Kucheva, University of California, Los Angeles

My analysis will estimate the effect of change in the proportion of subsidized housing units within a census tract on the change in the concentration of poor residents within the surrounding neighborhood between 1980 and 2000 in eight American cities. I hypothesize that introducing subsidized housing increases the percent poor within a neighborhood while eliminating subsidized housing has the opposite effect. In addition, I will explore whether there are any spatial spillover effects of subsidized housing onto the poverty levels in adjacent neighborhoods and whether these diminish with increasing distance to large subsidized developments. I expect to a find a smaller effect of subsidized housing on the concentration of poverty than the in previous studies due to a change in HUD’s policy towards providing low-income households with vouchers they can use in the private rental market and building mixed-income developments as opposed to exclusively low-income ones.