Landlords and Access to Opportunity

Dionissi Aliprantis, Hal Martin and David Phillips

No 19-02R2, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: housing choice vouchers; opportunity neighborhood; small area fair market rent; landlord; SAFMR; mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2019-11-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: First version January 2019 under the title “Can Landlords Be Paid to Stop Avoiding Voucher Tenants?” Second version (with current title) August 2019.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201902r2 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Landlords and access to opportunity (2022)
Working Paper: Landlords and Access to Opportunity (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwq:190202

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201902r2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().