How Landlords Segregate Neighborhoods

Eva Rosen asks a question of the obvious trend of people with Housing Choice Vouchers moving into impoverished and racially segregated neighborhoods: "Why are these patterns of segregation being recreated under a system that was meant to undo them?"

To answer that question, the article identifies and explores role that landlords plan in "sorting residents in and out of neighborhoods." According to Rosen's research, "there is a hierarchy of tenants, just as there is a hierarchy of homes. If the landlord plays the matching game wisely, 'there's a tenant for every house.' What this means though, is that the tenants at the bottom of the social ladder are also being matched to the worst homes, in the worst neighborhoods." The article goes on to describe more about how the matching process works and why landlords make their decisions about prospective tenants.

Rosen also recommends a proposed policy that could address the problem: "The formula that calculates Fair Market Rent should be reformed to use numbers for individual neighborhoods, rather than citywide averages." Notably, the Department of Housing and Urban Development recently proposed just such a policy [pdf].