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Did increasing new refugees’ access to social housing reduce homelessness? Evidence from a quasi-experiment

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Listed:
  • Zhang, Meng Le
  • Cheung, Sin Yi

    (Cardiff University)

  • Phillimore, Jenny

Abstract

Policies for resettling refugees are of utmost salience across Europe. The Home Office introduced the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) in 1999, which pursued a policy of evicting refugees from social housing within 28 days of gaining permission to remain in the UK. By contrast, changes in Scottish housing policy beginning in 2001 prioritised refugees for social housing. We investigate whether the Scottish policy reduced refugee homelessness eight months after permission to remain, using nonresponse rates of the 2005-2009 Survey of New Refugees as a lower-bound proxy for homelessness. NASS’s quasi-random scheme for allocating refugees across the UK represents a natural experiment for measuring plausibly causal effects. We find that refugees assigned to Glasgow, Scotland had a significantly lower homelessness rate than comparable refugees assigned to live elsewhere in the UK. We attribute this effect to allowing refugees priority access to social housing, discounting potential confounders and other mediators.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhang, Meng Le & Cheung, Sin Yi & Phillimore, Jenny, 2020. "Did increasing new refugees’ access to social housing reduce homelessness? Evidence from a quasi-experiment," SocArXiv tey4d, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:tey4d
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/tey4d
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