Michael C. Lens

American murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime?

Potential neighbors often express worries that Housing Choice Voucher holders heighten crime. Yet, no research systematically examines the link between the presence of voucher holders in a neighborhood and crime. Our article aims to do just this, using longitudinal, neighborhood-level crime, and voucher utilization data in 10 large US cities. We test whether the presence of additional voucher holders leads to elevated crime, controlling for neighborhood fixed effects, time-varying neighborhood characteristics, and trends in the broader sub-city area in which the neighborhood is located. In brief, crime tends to be higher in census tracts with more voucher households, but that positive relationship becomes insignificant after we control for unobserved differences across census tracts and falls further when we control for trends in the broader area. We find far more evidence for an alternative causal story; voucher use in a neighborhood tends to increase in tracts that have seen increases in crime, suggesting that voucher holders tend to move into neighborhoods where crime is elevated.

Employment Accessibility Among Housing Subsidy Recipients

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.

Subsidized Housing and Crime: Theory, Mechanisms, and Evidence

Subsidized housing controversies frequently involve the fear of crime, a connection that is not well understood in policy and planning. This article thus critically reviews the literature on subsidized housing and crime. Three key findings emerge. First, subsidized households have too frequently lived in violent housing developments and neighborhoods. Second, the spillover effects on crime in surrounding neighborhoods are typically very small. Finally, although the precise mechanisms through which subsidized housing may affect crime are less clear, it is most likely that concentrated disadvantage plays the biggest role when effects are observed, rather than the physical attributes of subsidized housing.

Is Crime Bad for Business? Crime and Commercial Property Values in New York City

To test how crime affects economic activity, we use point‐specific data on crime, commercial property sales and assessed values from New York City, relying on an instrumental variables strategy. We find that crime reduces commercial property values, and the magnitude of the effect depends on the type and geography of crime. Elasticities range from −0.1 to −0.5. We find stronger evidence for negative violent crime effects in neighborhoods with lower incomes and higher shares of minority residents. Thus, disadvantaged neighborhoods are doubly harmed by crime - they have higher crime rates and those crimes have stronger effects on economic activity.

The Limits of Housing Investment as a Neighborhood Revitalization Tool: Crime in New York City

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Local residents often oppose place-based affordable housing on the grounds that such housing will increase crime and decrease property values. New York City has actually used affordable housing investment as a neighborhood revitalization tool, leading to a positive impact on neighborhood property values. Households in distressed neighborhoods consistently cite crime as a problem, but we know little about the impact of housing investments on crime. Using a unique set of point-specific data on affordable housing and crime locations between 2002 and 2008 in New York City, I estimate a set of regression models to identify the effect that affordable housing investments have on crime on the block where they are situated. I find little evidence that affordable housing investments either reduce or increase crime on New York City blocks, suggesting there are limits to the revitalization effects of these subsidies and that crime fears about subsidized housing are unwarranted. Takeaway for practice: Cities with tight rental markets such as New York should continue to invest in affordable housing construction. However, these cities need to find ways to expand housing options in higher-income, less-distressed neighborhoods, or they risk exacerbating concentrated poverty and further subjecting low-income households to unsafe living environments.

Preserving Neighborhood Opportunity: Where Federal Housing Subsidies Expire

Abstract Rent burdens are increasing in U.S. metropolitan areas while subsidies on privately owned, publicly subsidized rental units are expiring. As a result, some of the few remaining affordable units in opportunity neighborhoods are at risk of being converted to market rate. Policy makers face a decision about whether to devote their efforts and scarce resources toward developing new affordable housing, recapitalizing existing subsidized housing, and/or preserving properties with expiring subsidies. There are several reasons to preserve these subsidies, one being that properties may be located in neighborhoods with greater opportunity. In this article, we use several sources of data at the census tract level to learn how subsidy expirations affect neighborhood opportunity for low-income households. Our analysis presents several key findings. First, we find that units that left the project-based Section 8 program were – on average – in lower opportunity neighborhoods, but these neighborhoods were improving. In addition, properties due to expiry from the Section 8 program between 2011 and 2020 are in higher opportunity neighborhoods than any other subsidy program. On the contrary, new Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units were developed in tracts similar to those where LIHTC units are currently active, which tend to be lower opportunity neighborhoods.

Measuring the geography of opportunity

Quantitative segregation research focuses almost exclusively on the spatial sorting of demographic groups. This research largely ignores the structural characteristics of neighborhoods – such as crime, job accessibility, and school quality – that likely help determine important household outcomes. This paper summarizes the research on segregation, neighborhood effects, and concentrated disadvantage, and argues that we should pay more attention to neighborhood structural characteristics, and that the data increasingly exist to include measures of spatial segregation and neighborhood opportunity. The paper concludes with a brief empirical justification for the inclusion of data on neighborhood violence and a discussion on policy applications.

Extremely low-income households, housing affordability and the Great Recession:

The effects of the Great Recession on housing equity and homeownership have been well-documented. However, we know little about how rental households fared and the efficacy of housing subsidies in addressing affordability gaps. This paper examines the extent to which rental housing became less affordable for Extremely Low-Income (ELI) households – those earning less than 30% of the Area Median Income (AMI). I then run regression models to determine the local characteristics most strongly associated with larger affordability gaps, with a focus on whether housing subsidies are effective at combating such gaps. Rental affordability gaps became more pronounced during the Great Recession. In nearly 70% of the counties in my sample, there was an increase from 2007 to 2010 in the number of ELI households per affordable rental unit. Across the country, the increase was 17%, a dramatic increase in only three years. There is considerable variation across the country, with acute affordability crises often concentrated in the South, particularly Florida. Regression models provide compelling evidence that housing vouchers, public housing, and project-based Section 8 subsidies play an important role in limiting the extent to which large numbers of ELI households are competing for a shortage of low-cost rental units. However, these programmes do not respond quickly to local needs – such as those brought about by the Great Recession. A pilot study where local housing authorities had funding to be more agile and responsive would be an important step toward crafting better policy.

Employment proximity and outcomes for Moving toOpportunity families

ABSTRACT The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) randomly assigned housing vouchers to public housing residents in an experimental test of the effect of neighborhood and location on household outcomes. In terms of adult employment outcomes, the 2 treatment groups did not significantly differ from the control group. We use MTO data to examine whether spatial proximity to jobs and job growth explains this lack of treatment effect. We first estimate differences in access to jobs and job growth for the 3 MTO groups. We then use 2-stage least squares models to test relationships between employment accessibility and 2 key outcomes: employment status and earned income. We find that employment accessibility declined for all groups, and these declines were strongest for the 2 treatment groups. However, our results show essentially no effect of employment proximity on earnings or employment status for MTO participants.