Subsidized Housing and Employment: Building Evidence about What Works to Improve Self-Sufficiency

Any opinions expressed are those of the author and not those of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University or of any of the persons or organizations providing support to the Joint Center for Housing Studies. Acknowledgment I would like to thank Sandra Newman and Joseph Harkness of the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University for helping me construct the overall framework for this paper and for contributing substantially to the presentation in certain sections. I would also like to thank Eric Belsky of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. Introduction For many years, policymakers have agreed that low-income, working-age people who receive government rent subsidies ought to strive for self-sufficiency and that the housing subsidy system should play an actively supportive role—or at least not stand in the way. This intent is clear in the most recent major public housing reform legislation, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) of 1998, which makes promoting residents' self-sufficiency a core objective. At the same time, there is a widely shared belief that government needs to push further in this direction, as reflected in the 2002 recommendation of the bipartisan Millennial Housing Commission that " more should be done to link housing assistance with economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility. " 1 Reflecting this longstanding interest, a variety of self-sufficiency innovations and housing policy reforms have been tried over the past two decades, and new ones are being proposed all the time. Yet what is striking about innovation in this field—proposed or actual—is that so little of it is based on credible evidence of " what works. " Rare are the kinds of rigorous impact evaluations based on randomized controlled trials that have become more common in the welfare-to-work and workforce development fields and that are increasingly used in criminal justice and education research. 2 This, of course, makes it difficult to know whether self-sufficiency strategies for assisted housing that sound promising are really a good bet or a bad investment. Given that many work-promoting services and supports exist outside subsidized housing and are already available to assisted residents, do interventions that are explicitly linked to housing subsidies really " add value " ? A number of descriptive and nonexperimental studies suggest that they do, but most studies are limited by the lack of appropriate control …