Achievement

The new geography of subsidized housing: The implications for urban povery: Since the mid-1970s, housing policy in the U.S. has shifted from providing aid through public housing projects to providing aid through private market vouchers and through smaller-scale and often mixed-income developments. Trainee Ann Owens investigates the extent to which this geographic redistribution of the urban poor accounts for changes in neighborhood poverty concentration, finding that while subsidized housing policies successfully deconcentrated subsidized housing units, they did not deconcentrate poverty in neighborhoods or metropolitan areas. Neighborhoods that gain more subsidized units see larger increases in poverty rates. Yet surprisingly, neighborhoods that lose subsidized units also become poorer, suggesting an enduring legacy of subsidized housing for neighborhood poverty. These results suggest that subsidized housing may maintain, rather than break, the cycle of neighborhood inequality.