What Determines the Success of Housing Mobility Programs?
This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents' outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting income-specific outcomes, and generates bias in ranking neighborhoods' effects. Moreover, targeting opportunity bargains based on previous residents' outcomes selects tracts with large disagreements in current and previous residents' outcomes, with such disagreements predicted by sorting since 1990. HMP success is aided by the ability to port vouchers across jurisdictions, access to cars, and relaxing supply constraints, perhaps by targeting lower-ranked neighborhoods.
This paper incorporates content from two previous working papers, one under the same title (WP 20-36) and the other circulated as “Neighborhood Sorting Obscures Neighborhood Effects in the Opportunity Atlas" (WP 20-37).
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 Kristen Tauber. 2022. “What Determines the Success of Housing Mobility Programs?” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 20-36R. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202036r
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