Families with Housing Subsidies Could Rent in Better Neighborhoods. Why Aren't They?

Guest: Alicia Mazzara, Research Analyst in the Housing Division, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities More than two million American families get monthly vouchers to help cover the rent through the nation’s Housing Choice Voucher program. The idea isn’t simply to keep families from becoming homeless. It’s also about helping them into a more stable economic situation so they won’t need government assistance anymore. The trouble is, most of these families don’t end up using their housing vouchers for apartments in the kinds of neighborhoods that make “moving up” likely. Rather, in most of America’s biggest cities, people on housing assistance end up overly-concentrated in poor, racially-segregated neighborhoods where schools struggle and good jobs are hard to come by. The real bummer here is that there are plenty of affordable apartments in higher-income neighborhoods. So why aren’t more families going there with their rental vouchers?