Housing Counseling Works: 2023 Update

The "Housing Counseling Works: 2023 Update" is a HUD-authored white paper which reviews and summarizes existing studies on homebuyer education and housing counseling services, including mobility counseling. This PD&R Edge article highlights the white paper's mobility counseling section and its relevancy to HUD's recent mobility efforts.

Mobility Counseling

HUD has undertaken several efforts to help low-income families access a range of neighborhoods. In 1974, Congress created the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, which subsidizes rents for low-income households in the private market. These vouchers allow households to move to neighborhoods with greater employment opportunities, higher-quality schools, and lower crime than they could otherwise afford. However, families with vouchers are not always able to move or prioritize moving to these higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Common barriers to such opportunity moves include landlord discrimination, inadequate access to public transportation, shortage of affordable housing, and insufficient resources available for application fees, security deposits, and moving expenses. Also, as noted by Tighe, Hatch, and Mead (2016), some research shows that voucher holders have insufficient information about higher-opportunity neighborhoods and housing options in those areas. To facilitate voucher holders' moves to less segregated and higher-opportunity neighborhoods, HUD and public housing agencies have launched various programs that complement mobility vouchers with tenant counseling and education.

Early Mobility Programs

The goal of helping low-income households move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods has been reinforced by studies that have found positive benefits for those families. One of the first targeted mobility programs emerged from Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, a lawsuit in the late 1960s in which Chicago public housing residents sued their public housing agency on the grounds that it had engaged in racial discrimination by locating its projects exclusively in neighborhoods with high concentrations of Black or African American residents and of poverty. The Gautreaux plaintiffs reached a settlement in which they received vouchers if they agreed to move to areas with a non-White population of less than 30 percent, which generally were higher-income suburbs. A HUD-sponsored short term impact report found that participating families moved to neighborhoods with higher average incomes and lower unemployment compared with their previous neighborhoods. Although this early evaluation of the Gautreaux households was quasi-experimental and couldn't control for selection bias, most households who accepted and utilized these vouchers reported satisfaction with their moves and an improvement with their quality of life.

Building on the positive outcomes from Gautreaux, HUD launched the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration program in the 1990s. MTO addressed some of the research limitations in Gautreaux by randomly placing eligible households in three different groups. Families in the experimental group received vouchers along with access to mobility counselors to help them find housing in areas with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent. Families in another group received a voucher without counseling services, and participants in a third group did not receive a voucher but could remain in public housing. Unlike the Gautreaux settlement, MTO did not operate under the court-ordered mandate of racial desegregation. This offered participating families greater flexibility in choosing where to live. As a result, most voucher holders moved to other central city neighborhoods near their original homes. Although these neighborhoods were less impoverished and more racially diverse than the neighborhoods where the residents had previously lived, they generally had higher poverty rates and a larger share of non-White residents than the neighborhoods where Gautreaux residents moved.

Although research from Kling, Liebman, and Katz (2007) and Sanbonmatsu et al (2012) did not observe significant economic and education findings from these opportunity moves, they did find notable improvements in other quality of life indicators for adult participants' such as physical and mental health. Children participants experienced some divergent outcomes. For example, participating adolescent girls experienced mental health benefits whereas participating boys experienced negative mental health and social outcomes. A subsequent study from Chetty and Hendren (2018) found positive social outcomes and statistically significant educational and economic outcomes for MTO adults who moved to higher-opportunity neighborhoods at a young age, particularly those who were under age 13 when they moved.

Effectiveness of Mobility Counseling

"Housing Counseling Works: 2023 Update" reviews several studies examining the impact that the offer of mobility counseling has on facilitating moves to opportunity areas. The white paper highlights findings that mobility counseling and housing search assistance can encourage low-income families to move to and remain in high-opportunity neighborhoods, including one study of MTO participants in Baltimore and one of Seattle's Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) demonstration. Darrah and Deluca's field study of residents participating in the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BHMP), which pairs mobility counseling and education with a requirement to move to low-poverty, racially mixed census tracts for at least 1 year, found that connecting families to neighborhood resources such as grocery stores, libraries, and schools encouraged families to move to these neighborhoods. Other studies, such as Bergman, Chan & Kapor (2020) and Chetty, Hendren, and Katz (2016), have noted specific benefits in providing voucher holders with information on local schools, especially those with young children. The white paper, however, suggested that the intensity of counseling matters and cited a study from Schwartz, Mihaly, and Gala (2017) that found no detectable impact from a "light-touch," voluntary counseling program.

Housing mobility initiatives are intended to help households with limited resources not only move to high-opportunity neighborhoods but also remain there. For example, the aforementioned study of Seattle's CMTO demonstration found that families who moved to high-opportunity areas were 41 percentage points more likely to remain in those areas after their first lease renewal. Darrah and Deluca's analysis of BHMP, which includes 2 years of post-move counseling to help ensure that these families remain in their new higher-opportunity neighborhoods after the required 1 year, showed similarly promising results. Their study found that in 2012, more than two-thirds of BHMP families were still living in low-poverty and racially integrated neighborhoods between 1 and 8 years after they first received their voucher, including approximately 75 percent of those moving from their initial BHMP unit.

Recognizing that landlords play a vital role in supporting and sustaining opportunity moves, some public housing agencies have incorporated landlord engagement strategies as part of their mobility programs. These efforts can both help potential tenants feel more comfortable with landlords and increase the likelihood that landlords will be willing to rent to voucher holders. Some research suggests that landlord engagement efforts can be effective at facilitating opportunity moves, particularly in states without source of income protections which prohibit landlords from refusing to rent to voucher holders. Based on in-depth interviews of landlords and property managers participating in BHMP, Cossyleon, Garboden, and DeLuca (2020) found that intensive engagement with landlords increases the likelihood of successful opportunity moves. They observed that landlords may be unaware of resources offered through the voucher program and posit that continuous outreach may be necessary to both recruit new landlords to the program and ensure that existing ones are up to date on those resources. Tenant-centered counseling can also strengthen landlord-tenant relationships and encourage more landlords to be receptive to voucher holders.

Areas for Future Research

The white paper summarizes literature which suggests that certain mobility counseling and related services can encourage families to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. However, further research on national and other local services and efforts are needed to determine the long-term outcomes of residents who receive mobility counseling and education. HUD is currently conducting this further research with the Community Choice Demonstration, the largest randomized controlled trial of housing mobility counseling that HUD has ever undertaken. Using a rigorous multi-site experiment, the Community Choice Demonstration is testing the most successful and cost-effective ways to help voucher families with children move to and stay in high opportunity areas as well as tracking an extensive set of outcomes for parents and their children. HUD has not yet released findings from this study.