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Working Paper

Landlords and Access to Opportunity

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Landlords in high-opportunity neighborhoods screen out tenants using vouchers. In our correspondence experiment, signaling voucher status cuts landlord responses in half. This voucher penalty increases with posted rent and varies little with signals of tenant quality and race. We repeat the experiment after a policy change and test how landlords respond to raising voucher payment limits by $450 per month in high-rent neighborhoods. Most landlords do not change their screening behavior; those who do respond are few and operate at small scale. Our results suggest a successful, systematic policy of moving to opportunity would require more direct engagement with landlords.
Topics
Neighborhood quality
Affordable housing
11.21.2019ISSN 2573-7953 WP 19-02R2Original Paper WP 19-02Revisions WP 19-02RDOI 10.26509/frbc-wp-201902r2
Keywords landlord, opportunity neighborhood, housing choice voucher, mobility, small area fair market rent (SAFMR)
JEL Classification Codes I38, R21, R23, R31, J15, H30

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.

Suggested Citation

Aliprantis, Dionissi, Hal Martin, and David Phillips. 2019. “Landlords and Access to Opportunity.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 19-02R2. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201902r2