Housing is the backbone of wellbeing, affecting everything from health to food security to child development. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program plays a crucial role in efforts to address housing insecurity, reduce homelessness, and promote economic mobility. Sometimes referred to as Section 8 or tenant-based rental assistance, the HCV Program provides rental assistance to more than 2.3 million low-income families, the elderly, and people with disabilities, in the form of vouchers for housing in the private-rental market. For many, these vouchers are the difference between stable housing and homelessness.
As the program marks its 50th anniversary in 2024, we reflect on the policy questions program leaders faced over the decades, and how rigorous research provided the evidence for critical decision-making. Abt has conducted a long series of demonstrations, evaluations, and other studies to help policy makers understand the effectiveness of different approaches to providing tenant-based rental assistance; the feasibility and costs of administering the program; challenges faced by households when searching for housing; the impacts of vouchers on housing stability and other aspects of well-being for adults and children, and services that could make the program a more effective tool for increasing households’ economic mobility.
Research Milestones: 1970 to Today
The foundation for a voucher program began in the 1970s, when the Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP) found that even the most disadvantaged households would be able to use subsidies in private market housing, the program could be administered by a variety of organizations, and that a large influx of subsidies would not cause rent inflation. The largest social experiment of its time, EHAP assessed the feasibility and effectiveness of a new approach to making housing affordable. Eligible households received housing “allowances” or direct payments, enabling them to live in private market rental housing rather than designated housing units built specifically for low-income households. HUD contracted Abt to conduct two of the three components of EHAP: the Demand Experiment, which tested 19 alternative forms of a subsidy paid to private market tenants, including the “housing gap” approach that became the basis of the Housing Choice Voucher program; and the Administrative Agency Experiment, which studied the feasibility and cost of administering tenant-based housing assistance.
The findings from the EHAP experiment forged a new era in federal housing policy through the landmark Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which created Section 8 tenant-based housing assistance as an operating program, rather than an experiment. Rising housing costs along with improving quality of U.S. housing stock made reducing the burden of severe inflation on renters a new priority for the federal government. In the following years, HUD frequently engaged Abt to study how tenant-based rental assistance was working and how it could be improved. Eventually renamed Housing Choice Vouchers, the program has maintained the same structure as EHAP, with the voucher filling the gap between the cost of rent and 30 percent of the household’s income.
In the early 1980s, Abt conducted a study of Participation and Benefits in the Urban Section 8 Program. Commissioned by HUD, the study compared the Section 8 Existing Housing (i.e., voucher) program with Section 8 New Construction, another program created in 1974 that developed housing for occupancy by low-income renters. The study’s finding that the voucher approach provided housing of equal quality at a lower cost influenced the view of many policymakers that vouchers should be the core housing program for low-income renters.
In the mid-1980s, HUD contracted Abt to compare two slightly different versions of vouchers allocated to public housing authorities (PHAs) by the Freestanding Housing Voucher Demonstration. One version provided greater flexibility for the way in which households could use the subsidy. Based on the study’s findings, the two programs were merged into the current Housing Choice Voucher program.
The HCV program continued to grow throughout the 1980s, and by the end of the decade was providing housing assistance to about 2 million households. However, concerns about the program grew as many households issued vouchers were not able to use them; instead they returned to the bottom of long waiting lists for other housing assistance programs. Although vouchers were less concentrated in neighborhoods with high poverty rates than public housing or Section 8 new construction, the program was not fulfilling its promise to enable families with children to live in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and good schools.
To respond to the first concern, HUD commissioned Abt to conduct a series of studies of factors that influenced the “success rates” of households trying to use vouchers. The studies found that the main factor was the tightness of the local housing market. Echoing the finding of the Housing Allowance Demand Experiment, and despite continuing evidence of discrimination based on race, the studies did not find that people of color were less successful in using vouchers.
To respond to the second concern, in the early 1990s, HUD asked Congress to create the Moving to Opportunity demonstration, which required some families with children moving out of public housing to use their vouchers in census tracts with poverty rates lower than 10 percent. “It was the first random-assignment social science experiment designed to identify the causal effects of moving from high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods,” HUD notes. HUD contracted Abt and the National Bureau of Economic Research to design and implement the experiment and to conduct the interim evaluation, which found that those who moved to areas with lower poverty reported better personal safety, mental and physical health, housing quality, and improved mental health and school attendance.
In the early 2000s, experimental studies conducted by Abt examined the impacts of vouchers on many aspects of the well-being of families with children. The study of the Effects of Housing Vouchers on Welfare Families was a randomized control trial that followed more than 8,700 families for three and a half years and looked at the impact of using a voucher on the characteristics of their neighborhoods, the composition of their households, their employment, earnings, participation in education, receipt of public assistance, material hardship, and the well-being of their children. Abt’s analysis found that vouchers were effective in providing housing stability, reduced housing crowding and doubling up, and—most importantly—prevented families with children from experiencing homelessness.
In about 2008, Abt began the Family Options Study, which is still ongoing as of 2024. The study has followed 2,200 families since they entered emergency shelter after experiencing homelessness. The families were randomly assigned to receive long-term rent subsidies (usually a voucher), another type of program, or to stay in shelter. After three years, Abt found that providing families with priority access to vouchers not only prevents homelessness but also reduces food insecurity, school moves for children, and intimate partner violence. Despite their experiences with homelessness, a very high percentage of families were able to use their vouchers. This rigorous study changed the way U.S. policymakers at all levels of government address homelessness.
The Small Area Fair Market Rent Demonstration (SAFMR) offered new insight on a tool for increasing access to low-poverty neighborhoods and greater opportunity for families. Voucher rent standards were set based on zip codes, rather than for an overall metro area, which can enable voucher holders to move to higher-rent, lower-poverty neighborhoods. Abt’s report found that households with children who used the SAFMR voucher were more likely to move to more advantaged neighborhoods.
New Frontiers for Housing Security and Solutions
What started as a 1970s experiment to understand the feasibility of a new approach to housing assistance in the U.S. has become the cornerstone of federal housing assistance, serving more than 2 million households. The HCV Program continues to protect children and families from homelessness, encourage moves to low-poverty areas to enhance children’s educational and health outcomes, and promote economic mobility.
Now, a half a century later, we are partnering with HUD to assess how the voucher program might evolve to serve the needs of families and individuals today and tomorrow. This includes examining how landlords might accept more vouchers for rental units in the Moving To Work Landlord Incentives Cohort and partnering with eight Community Choice Demonstration sites to learn how housing mobility-related services might be scaled up to support moves to low-poverty areas by families with children.
We are also starting to explore the longer-term impact on family and child well-being of direct rental assistance, or cash payments made to the household directly rather than to the landlord. That would be a return to the model used in the Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP).
Behind every program change or service delivery update, research is the bedrock of data-driven decision-making to help more families find a place to call home. Abt has evolved innovative and rigorous methods to answer the questions our clients and policymakers have—building the evidence for more effective, equitable housing assistance.