Related UI Researchers

Publications on Housing

Urban Institute researchers and a dozen contributors explore how public housing reform policies could overcome the persistent disadvantages facing black communities and black families and whether ignoring these disadvantages may undermine the long-term vision for public housing's transformation. Authors recount the history of racial segregation in public housing, highlight the consequences, and debate remedies.

Housing costs constitute the single biggest expenditure in most family budgets, and many low-income families have difficulty finding housing they can reasonably afford. Although most family-strengthening and community change initiatives recognize the urgency of the housing problems facing low-income families, they often have difficulty figuring out how to constructively address them. Federal housing programs are numerous and confusing, implementation is balkanized, funding falls woefully short of needs, and policy debates often focus on narrow technical issues. This primer demystifies federal rental assistance programs and provides the most current information available on how many (and who) they serve and how their scale is changing. It also summarizes key challenges facing housing policy today and in the coming years—challenges that may create opportunities for federal, state, and local engagement and innovation.

Although the ongoing foreclosure crisis has focused the nation’s attention on housing problems and policies, the struggles of renters have largely been overlooked. A new guide demystifies federal rental assistance programs, providing the latest information on who they serve and how their scale has changed, details on funding flows and federal-state-local-private responsibilities, explanations of how participants are selected, and overviews of challenges facing housing policy.

This report is an analysis of alternative datasets and research approaches to assess the effects of Hurricane Katrina on populations served by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Administration for Children and Families (ACF). The assessment addresses four overarching research questions, with an emphasis on using existing datasets: 1) where did populations of interest go and where are they living since Katrina; what are the effects on income and employment; what are the needs for ACF programs and services; and how did the disaster affect ACF programs themselves? The report includes an extensive annotated bibliography of analyses through January 2007.

For the past two decades the United States has been transforming distressed public housing communities, with three ambitious goals: replace distressed developments with healthy mixed-income communities; help residents relocate to affordable housing, often in the private market; and empower former public housing families toward economic self-sufficiency. The transformation has focused on deconcentrating poverty, but not on the underlying role of racial segregation in creating these distressed communities. In Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation, scholars and public housing officials assess whether—and how—public housing policies can simultaneously address the problems of poverty and race.