Employment Accessibility Among Housing Subsidy Recipients

Michael Lens

Housing Policy Debate, 2014, vol. 24, issue 4, 671-691

Abstract: This article estimates the extent to which different types of subsidized households live near employment, measuring the extent of spatial mismatch between these households and employment. Using census tract-level data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on housing subsidy locations and employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this article uses a distance-decay function to estimate job-accessibility indices for census tracts in metropolitan statistical areas with 100,000 people or more. I use these data to create weighted job-accessibility indices for housing subsidy recipients (public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Section 8 New Construction, and housing voucher households) and the total population and renter households earning below 50% of area median income as points of comparison. I find that of all these groups, by a large margin, public housing households live in census tracts with the greatest proximity to low-skilled jobs. However, they also live among the greatest concentration of individuals who compete for those jobs, namely, the low-skilled unemployed. These findings suggest that we pay close attention to the trade-offs that public housing residents are making as these units are demolished and replaced with vouchers.

Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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DOI: 10.1080/10511482.2014.905966

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