Housing Choice Voucher Holders Still Face Barriers to Mobility

The Housing Choice voucher program was created to give low-income households the opportunity to move out of public housing—where the effects of the cycle of poverty are severe—and into federally subsidized rental units. The program's success depends on both the willingness of landlords in better neighborhoods to offer voucher-subsidized units and for voucher recipients to relocate to better neighborhoods.

However, concentrated poverty and segregation persist. As Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes write, voucher recipients' "housing choices remain limited to racially segregated low-income neighborhoods that may not be much different than where they started...Delivering on the potential of the voucher program to improve access to opportunity means grappling with the barriers to mobility that restrict its use."

Kneebone and Holmes compare the conditions of voucher holders with poor families living in rental housing and public housing. They find that across the country, voucher holders live in less concentrated poverty than public housing residents and low-income renters, but they still live in majority-minority neighborhoods where the average poverty rate is between 19 and 29 percent. They cite a Macarthur Foundation study, which finds that voucher holders live near lower-performing schools than poor families overall, but higher-performing schools than public housing residents.