Impacts of Welfare Reform on Recipients of Housing Assistance: Evidence From Indiana and Delaware (February 2003, 103p.)
Welfare reform and housing assistance programs have the
potential to strongly affect one another, because of the substantial
overlap in the populations they serve. Nationally, about 30
percent of families on welfare receive federal housing assistance.
Conversely, close to half of all HUD-assisted families with
children receive some income from welfare in any given year.
This overlap creates the possibility for housing assistance
to influence welfare reform efforts and, in the other direction,
for welfare reform to affect housing assistance.
Although the potential for interactive effects between welfare
reform and housing assistance has been recognized, relatively
little rigorous research evidence is available on the subject.
For example, this is the first study that uses HUD administrative
data to estimate the experimental impacts of welfare reform
on exits from housing assistance. On the other hand, intriguing
evidence from welfare reform experiments in three states indicates
that welfare reform may have larger impacts on families with
housing assistance than on welfare recipients living in private,
unsubsidized housing (Miller et al. 2000; Riccio and Orenstein
2000). Housing subsidies' potential to improve the effectiveness
of welfare reform has implications for how state welfare agencies
and housing programs might target resources, and provides
a strong rationale for integrating services.
This study builds on previous research in three ways. First,
it presents experimental impact estimates of welfare reform
for housing assistance subgroups from two states, adding to
the existing findings from three other states. Second, this
study uses HUD administrative records to identify receipt
of housing assistance, a more accurate source than survey
measures of housing assistance, the measure used in prior
studies. Third, this study presents experimental estimates
of welfare reform's impacts on length of time spent receiving
housing assistance, using longitudinal measures of housing
assistance from HUD administrative records, which has not
been done before.
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