The History of Housing Insecurity Research at PD&R

Katherine Tait, Economist, Housing and Demographic Research Division (HDAD), Office of Policy Development & Research (PD&R)
George R. Carter III, Director, Housing and Demographic Research Division (HDAD), Office of Policy Development & Research (PD&R)

Throughout its history, the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) has sought to understand the prevalence, causes, and consequences of housing insecurity, and our recent work has focused on the methodological development of an index to measure it. Housing insecurity is defined as a significant lapse of one or more elements of secure housing, including affordability, stable occupancy, and safety and decency, and can be understood as a continuum encompassing a range of housing experiences. Whereas homelessness represents total housing insecurity, and residence in affordable, stable, decent, and safe housing represents total housing security, a range of housing vulnerabilities and experiences lies in between. This range of vulnerabilities and experiences results from obstacles to accessing affordable, stable, decent, and safe housing, which affects a broad cross-section of Americans. Because evidence suggests that secure housing promotes positive outcomes in child development, health, educational attainment, employment, and crime deterrence, housing insecurity is a crucial concept for researchers and policymakers to understand more systematically.

To date, the multidimensionality of housing insecurity has posed a challenge for researchers, who have observed that no consensus measure of the concept exists (Cox, Henwood, Rodnyansky, Wenzel, and Rice 2019; DeLuca and Rosen 2022; Murdoch, Brahmachari, Okyere, Moumen, and Streiff 2022; Watson and Carter 2020). Researchers have operationalized housing insecurity differently across empirical studies, thus making the concept difficult to track reliably over time. In 2017, PD&R addressed this issue by prioritizing the development of a Housing Insecurity Research Module (HIRM) in its Research Roadmap. Motivating PD&R’s effort to develop a housing insecurity index was the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) development of a food security measure, as well as the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s global Multidimensional Poverty Index. PD&R, which sponsors the American Housing Survey (AHS), developed the HIRM as an opt-in, follow-on survey conducted along with the 2019 AHS. Based on a set of questions that were informed by an expert panel, staff from both HUD and the U.S. Census Bureau, and existing research, the module collected data on multiple dimensions of housing insecurity that could be used to develop housing insecurity indices. The HIRM focused on three key dimensions of housing insecurity: lack of affordability, lack of stable occupancy, and lack of safety and decency. HUD contracted a multiyear research project to develop housing insecurity index recommendations using the 2019 AHS HIRM data that culminated in a report published in 2022, “Measuring Housing Insecurity: Index Development Using American Housing Survey Data.” The report represents crucial progress that allows PD&R to plan for continued methodological testing and refinement across multiple AHS samples (Murdoch et al. 2022).

The work to improve measures of housing insecurity is linked inextricably to PD&R's longstanding research on housing precarity. To mark PD&R's 50th anniversary, we revisit past research on housing insecurity, consider the implications of analogous index development efforts for PD&R's current work, highlight the department's progress on housing insecurity indices, and review recent analyses of housing insecurity from the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey. We conclude by considering avenues for future research on housing insecurity.

Previous Related Research at PD&R

PD&R conducts research to support evidence-based policymaking that improves life in American communities. Although every administration has different research priorities, PD&R's researchers have established many lines of research over time, including work on fair housing, affordable housing, homelessness and special needs services, homeownership, housing finance, housing market characteristics, housing production and technology, and community and economic development. Many studies in these areas have contributed to PD&R's work on housing insecurity, including work on worst case housing needs, housing adequacy, overcrowding, and homelessness. Each of these subjects contributes, in part, to one or more dimensions of the concept of housing insecurity.

Worst Case Housing Needs

A recent article for the PD&R at 50 series in PD&R Edge chronicles the history and importance of the biennial Worst Case Housing Needs report that HUD delivers to Congress. Worst case housing needs refer to a longstanding measure of the extent of unmet needs for affordable rental housing of adequate quality and draws on AHS data for its analysis. Households with worst case housing needs are very low-income renter households (defined as those with incomes at or below 50 percent of the area median income) that do not receive government housing assistance. Two types of severe problems determine whether these households have worst case needs: severe rent burden, meaning that they spend more than one-half of their income on rent and utilities, or severely inadequate housing, meaning that their units have one or more serious physical problems related to heating, plumbing, and electrical systems or maintenance (Alvarez and Steffen 2023).

The 2023 report shows that the number of renter households with worst case housing needs reached a new high of 8.53 million in 2021, up from 7.77 million in 2019, and the rate of very low-income households experiencing worst case housing needs also has increased in recent years. Notably, the prevalence of worst case housing needs increased across demographic groups and household types. The authors of the 2023 report find that the increasing rate of worst case housing needs among very low-income renters is attributable to the "increasing dominance of housing cost burden rather than housing inadequacy" (Alvarez and Steffen 2023). The crisis of insufficient affordable and available rental housing units, coupled with the increased prevalence of very low-income households with worst case housing needs, means that the number of very low-income renters experiencing severe problems "far exceeds the number of [such] households either receiving housing assistance or residing in naturally affordable private housing," underscoring the importance of measuring and reporting the housing needs of the most vulnerable (Steffen 2023).

Housing Adequacy

Since 1973, the American Housing Survey (formerly the Annual Housing Survey) has measured housing adequacy to assess how well the U.S. housing stock meets decency and suitability standards. Housing adequacy is an element of the safety and decency dimension of housing insecurity and is closely related to the affordability dimension. The physical adequacy component of housing quality is significant because it relates to the prevalent affordability problem (Garrison, Mateyka, and Tait 2023). As researchers studying worst case housing needs have noted, a tradeoff exists between affordability and adequacy: households often accept higher cost burdens to achieve housing adequacy, an effect that can be especially pronounced when racial and ethnic discrimination, segregation, and neighborhood preference further limit housing options (Steffen 2023). Moreover, as the 2023 Worst Case Housing Needs report demonstrates, when the available housing stock is assessed according to affordability, availability, and adequacy (see exhibits 2-8 and 2-10 in Alvarez and Steffen 2023), housing supply decreases substantially with the introduction of each additional criterion (Alvarez and Steffen 2023, 24).

Overcrowding and Doubling Up

In 2006, PD&R commissioned a study of overcrowding that focused on the consequences of overcrowding for occupants of a household (Blake, Kellerson, and Simic 2007). The study considered principal and alternative definitions of overcrowding: persons-per-room (PPR), persons-per-bedroom (PPB), unit square footage-per-person (USFPP), and persons-per-room by unit square footage-per-person (PPR x USFPP) and assessed overcrowding using PPR, PPB, and USFPP measures. Since the publication of this study, PPR has become the most widely adopted measurement to assess overcrowding. The 2023 Worst Case Housing Needs report explores the overlap between overcrowding and worst case housing needs; using the PPR criterion, the report notes that HUD considers overcrowding to be a moderate housing problem (that is, not sufficiently severe to qualify a household as having worst case housing needs) but also describes some of the insecurities that overcrowding can introduce (Alvarez and Steffen 2023, 10). The report notes, for example, that "a household's decision to rent an undersized unit...might be a way to avoid taking on the severe cost burdens associated with appropriately sized units" and that overcrowding can harm health, educational outcomes, and family dynamics (Alvarez and Steffen 2023, 10).

An important variant of overcrowding is "doubling up," a practice in which more than one family (or subfamilies) share a housing unit because of economic hardship or loss of housing. Doubling up is correlated with homelessness, worst case housing needs, and housing insecurity in general. Moreover, considerable social science research has shown that doubling up demonstrates the importance of social relationships for determining relative housing insecurity, particularly for poor renters or those without leases. (For a review of shared housing arrangements, see: DeLuca and Rosen 2022; also see: Ahrentzen 2003). Doubled-up households have increased over time in the United States, with some researchers estimating that 15 to 20 percent of children nationally live in doubled-up households (Harvey, Dunifon and Pilkauskas 2021). Others have observed that "the cumulative prevalence [of doubling up] over childhood is likely even higher" and that "nationally representative survey data likely underestimate the prevalence of such arrangements" (DeLuca and Rosen 2022, 351). An analysis of AHS data found that household sharing increased in the United States from 2003 to 2009 (Eggers and Moumen 2013). In addition to the difficulty of accurately measuring doubled-up households, it is also challenging to distinguish families that double up to temporarily pool resources during the housing life cycle from families who double up because they are at risk of homelessness. The AHS includes variables that can be used to calculate PPR, PPB, USFPP, and the number of subfamilies living in the housing unit. These measures, as well as a subjective indicator of "more people staying in the housing unit than can comfortably live in the unit," were incorporated as indicators of crowding and doubling up in the housing insecurity index development work in the 2022 "Measuring Housing Insecurity" report.

Homelessness

Among the most housing insecure are individuals and families who experience homelessness. Homelessness is related to all three dimensions of housing insecurity. Homelessness represents the most severe form of residential instability and is correlated with affordable housing supply. People who experience homelessness are more likely to be exposed to substandard, unsafe living conditions. Since the early 1980s, the U.S. Census Bureau, and later HUD, have sponsored and designed data collection instruments to estimate the size of the homeless population. Since 2005, the Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs has led the collection, analysis, and publication of the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, which includes both Point-in-Time counts and annual estimates of homelessness from localities’ Homeless Management Information Systems.

Since the 1990s, PD&R has conducted, funded, and supervised grants, cooperative agreements, interagency agreements, contracts, evaluations, and demonstrations to better understand homelessness and HUD programs that address homelessness. PD&R’s homelessness research has covered studies of impacts, outcomes, and implementation of specific programs; studies examining specific subpopulations of people experiencing homelessness; studies of institutions and systems; and community-specific case studies. Recently published research has focused on the Family Unification Program, rapid rehousing, homeless encampments, unsheltered homelessness, and market predictors of homelessness. Current ongoing projects include research on the Emergency Housing Voucher program, community-based research, rapid rehousing, the Family Options Study Long Term Follow-up, youth homelessness, homeless students, and foster youth.

Housing Insecurity in Household Pulse Survey

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS), which was designed to quickly capture information about household experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, includes several questions about housing circumstances that researchers have used to conduct timely assessments of the state of housing in the U.S. The HPS survey instrument included several questions directly related to the affordability and stability dimensions of housing insecurity. For example, respondents were asked whether they were behind on their rental payments (“Is this household currently caught up on rent payments?”) or mortgage payments (“Is this household currently caught up on mortgage payments?”) and whether they feared imminent eviction (“How likely is it that your household will have to leave this home or apartment within the next 2 months because of eviction?”). HUD publishes these data  regularly in its monthly Housing Market Indicators report. In 2023, HPS added questions on forced moves.

According to the September 2023 Housing Market Indicators report, HPS data on renter households' ability to pay rent showed that 12.0 percent of renter households were behind on rental payments during the current period (July 26 to August 7, 2023), a decline from 12.6 percent in the previous survey period (from June 28 to July 10, 2023) and from 14.2 percent from the previous year (from July 27 to August 8, 2022). HPS data also showed that the percentage of renter households fearful of imminent eviction was 4.1 percent during the current survey period and 5.1 percent in the previous survey period, a decline from 6.4 percent in the previous year. In addition, HPS data revealed that 5.3 percent of homeowner households were behind on mortgage payments during the current survey period compared with 5.0 percent in the previous survey period and 5.2 percent from the prior year. Furthermore, HPS data indicates that 0.98 percent of homeowner households feared imminent eviction in the current survey period, compared with 0.91 percent in the previous survey period and 1.01 percent in the previous year. Figures 1 and 2 display the overall trends in these indicators from September 2020 through August 2023.

Figure 1. Housing Insecurity, Weighted Household Estimates From the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, September 2020 to August 2023

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 2023. "Housing Market Indicators Monthly Update: September 2023."

Figure 2. Households Fearful of Losing Their Homes, Weighted Household Estimates from Census Household Pulse Survey, September 2020 to August 2023

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 2023. "Housing Market Indicators Monthly Update: September 2023."

Housing Insecurity Measurement Research: Where We Are Now

Housing Insecurity Data Collection: 2023 AHS

PD&R’s “Measuring Housing Insecurity: Index Development Using American Housing Survey Data” report estimated gold standard classifications of households across the continuum of housing insecurity, from housing secure to very highly housing insecure. The authors estimated the gold standard classifications using a comprehensive set of indicators from both the 2019 AHS HIRM and 2019 AHS core questions (table 1). Affordability indicators included questions about respondents’ worries about their inability to pay housing costs, lapses in housing payments, and housing expense hardships. Stable Occupancy indicators included questions about the risk and level of worry about forced moves, residential instability or dislocation, and household sharing. Safety and Decency indicators included questions on poor housing quality, overcrowding, and lack of safety. Households classified as housing secure have low scores on all dimensions of housing insecurity, whereas households classified as having very high housing insecurity have high scores in all the categories. Households between these poles exhibit varying scores across the different dimensions of housing insecurity. All households classified as having high and very high housing insecurity experience affordability problems in addition to problems in other dimensions.

In addition to the gold standard classifications, the authors developed long-, medium-, and short-form versions of the index that reduced the number of items in the index. The goal of the shortened versions was to maximize the transferability of the index across survey environments while limiting any possible decline in the index's validity and reliability that these items' removal might cause. Using the gold standard classifications as a standard for comparison, table 2 shows the number of cases correctly classified with the reduced forms of the index. The medium-form version of the index performed nearly as well as the longer version, whereas the short-form version was less accurate than the other versions at classifying households in the same categories as the gold standard method. Questions from the medium- and short-form versions of the index were included in a housing insecurity module in the 2023 AHS and administered to half of the AHS sample. This expanded sample will provide more robust data for further testing and index refinement. PD&R plans to fund additional research to further refine the housing insecurity index and module content and intends to release the housing insecurity module variables as part of the 2023 AHS public use file to facilitate both internal and external research on housing insecurity.

Table 1. Dimensions, Subdimensions, and Measures in the Gold Standard HI Factor Scores

HI = housing insecurity. HI 1 = lack of affordability factor score. HI 2 = lack of stable occupancy factor score. HI 3 = lack of safety and decency factor score.
^a HUD defines households with worst case needs as very low-income renters who do not receive government housing assistance and who pay more than one-half of their income for rent, live in severely inadequate conditions, or both (Alvarez and Steffen, 2021).
^b The residual income metric is the ratio of residual income to threshold non-shelter housing costs. The threshold non-shelter housing costs are obtained from the Supplemental Poverty Measure (Fox 2020).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2019 American Housing Survey.
Table from: Murdoch, Brahmachari, Okeyere, Moumen, and Streif (2022, xvii).

Table 2. Number and Percent Correctly Classified and Correlation With Gold Standard Profiles for Each Set of Reduced Measures

HI = housing insecurity.
*Corresponds to Gold Standard Profile 1, 2, and 3 due to loss of information with the short form measures.
** Corresponds to Gold Standard Profiles 4 and 5 due to loss of information with the short form measures.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2019 American Housing Survey Accuracy Statement:
The U.S. Census Bureau has reviewed this data product to ensure appropriate access, use, and disclosure avoidance protection of the confidential source data used to produce this product (Data Management System (DMS) number: P-7516455, Disclosure Review Board (DRB) approval numbers: CBDRB-FY22-066 and CBDRB-FY22-079).
Table from: Murdoch, Brahmachari, Okeyere, Moumen, and Streif (2022, 76).

Avenues for Future Research

The primary focus of the next phase of housing insecurity research will be refining the housing insecurity index developed in the first Housing Insecurity Research contract with data from the 2023 AHS. Housing insecurity data from the 2023 AHS and subsequent index development research will facilitate the production of preliminary housing insecurity prevalence estimates. PD&R's goal is to produce a transferable set of questions that can be incorporated into other surveys and evaluation studies, advancing our understanding of the incidence of housing insecurity and how to address it. The development of a transferable module also facilitates the incorporation of these questions into surveys that explore research areas that AHS cannot, such as the distinction between individual-level and household-level housing insecurity. The more data researchers have on the experiences of housing insecurity, the more opportunities PD&R will have to understand the detrimental effects of housing insecurity and insufficient affordable housing, predict housing precarity, and identify risks to stable housing. Ultimately, this knowledge will enable PD&R to improve housing insecurity evaluations and interventions to support HUD's broader mission to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all.

References

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Alvarez, Thyria A. and Barry L. Steffen. 2021. “Worst Case Housing Needs: 2021 Report to Congress,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. 

Alvarez, Thyria A. and Barry L. Steffen. 2023. “Worst Case Housing Needs: 2023 Report to Congress,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research.

Blake, Kevin S., Rebecca L. Kellerson and Aleksandra Simic. 2007. “Measuring overcrowding in housing,” report prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. 

Carter, George R., III. 2023. “The History of the AHS – 1973 – 2023,” PD&R Edge, 11 July.

Cox, Robynn, Benjamin Henwood, Seva Rodnyansky, Eric Rice, and Suzanne Wenzel. 2019. “Roadmap to a Unified Measure of Housing Insecurity,” Cityscape, 21: 2, 93-128.

DeLuca, Stefanie and Eva Rosen. 2022. “Housing Insecurity Among the Poor Today,” Annual Review of Sociology (48): 343–71.

Eggers, Frederick J. and Fouad Moumen. 2013. “Analysis of Trends in Household Composition Using American Housing Survey Data.” Report prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research.

Fox, Liana. 2020. “The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2019,” Current Population Reports P60-272, U.S. Census Bureau.

Garrison, Veronica Helms, Peter Mateyka, and Katherine Tait. 2023. “Understanding the Unique Housing Needs of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders: HUD's Commitment to Data Disaggregation,” PD&R Edge, 30 May.

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Miller, Charles Edward. 2019. “Homeless encampment, Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” image, Library of Congress.

Murdoch, James, Meghna Brahmachari, Dennis Okyere, Fouad Moumen, and Sean Streiff. 2022. “Measuring Housing Insecurity: Index Development Using American Housing Survey Data,” report prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research.

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