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Rent Vouchers and the Price of Low-Income Housing

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Author Info
Scott Susin (none)
Abstract

Since the early 1980s, low-income housing subsidies have increasingly shifted towards vouchers which allow recipients to rent in the private market. By 1993, vouchers subsidized as many households as lived in traditional housing projects, although most low-income households did not receive any subsidies. This study investigates whether this policy has raised rents for unsubsidized poor households, as many analysts predicted when the program was conceived. The main finding is that low-income households in metropolitan areas with more vouchers have experienced faster rent increases than those where vouchers are less abundant. In the 90 biggest metropolitan areas, vouchers have raised rents by 16 percent on average, a large effect consistent with a low supply elasticity in the low quality rental housing market. Considered as a transfer program, this result implies that vouchers have caused a $8.2 billion increase in the total rent paid by low-income non-recipients, while only providing a subsidy of $5.8 billion to recipients, resulting in a net loss of $2.4 billion to low-income households.

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Paper provided by Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy in its series Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, Working Paper Series with number 1005.

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Date of creation: 27 Jun 2006
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Handle: RePEc:cdl:bphupl:1005

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  3. Somerville, C Tsuriel, 1999. "Residential Construction Costs and the Supply of New Housing: Endogeneity and Bias in Construction Cost Indexes," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 43-62, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Dickins, William T, 1990. "Error Components in Grouped Data: Is It Ever Worth Weighting?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 72(2), pages 328-33, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Eric A. Hanushek & Steven G. Rivkin & Lori L. Taylor, 1996. "Aggregation and the Estimated Effects of School Resources," NBER Working Papers 5548, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  7. Schnare, Ann B. & Struyk, Raymond J., 1976. "Segmentation in urban housing markets," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 146-166, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Olsen, Edgar O., 1987. "The demand and supply of housing service: A critical survey of the empirical literature," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: E. S. Mills (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 25, pages 989-1022 Elsevier. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Weicher, John C. & Thibodeau, Thomas G., 1988. "Filtering and housing markets: An empirical analysis," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 21-40, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  11. David Card & Alan Krueger, 1990. "Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States," Working Papers 645, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.. [Downloadable!]
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  12. William N. Goetzmann & Matthew I. Spiegel, 1997. "A Spatial Model of Housing Returns and Neighborhood Substitutability," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm64, Yale School of Management. [Downloadable!]
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  13. DiPasquale, Denise, 1999. "Why Don't We Know More about Housing Supply?," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 9-23, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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