Approximately 30 percent of families receiving welfare also receive federal housing assistance, and almost half of all HUD-assisted families with children receive some income from welfare in any given year. Although experts recognize the potential for interactive effects between welfare reform and housing assistance, relatively little rigorous research is available on the subject. A new study from HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research, "Impacts of Welfare Reform on Recipients of Housing Assistance: Evidence From Indiana and Delaware," explores the relationship between welfare reform efforts and housing assistance in the two states. The study uses results from experiments in welfare reform, in which families were assigned randomly to be subject to the new rules or remain under the old rules of the welfare system. Researchers assessed the effects of welfare reform by type of housing assistance (public housing, vouchers, Section 8 Project assistance, and no housing assistance) on families' welfare receipt, employment, earnings, and other measures of self-sufficiency. They also prepared non-experimental estimates of the effects of housing assistance on employment and welfare receipt. Overall, the evidence from this study suggests that welfare reform did not, for the most part, have substantially different impacts for families receiving both welfare with housing assistance in Indiana and Delaware compared to welfare recipients without housing assistance. Experimental analysis shows that in both states, families that received housing assistance (public housing, vouchers, or Section 8 Project assistance) and were subject to welfare reform had increasing earnings and employment and decreasing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and food stamp payments. Not all impacts were statistically significant. However, similar results were found for the unassisted group. Nonexperimental analyses show that families living in public housing moved less often and faced less financial strain than families without housing assistance but lived in more distressed neighborhoods. Families using vouchers also faced less financial strain (except for greater problems paying utility bills), but lived in neighborhoods similar to those of families in private, unsubsidized housing. These analyses also show that among families that were exposed to welfare reform and who also received housing assistance at the beginning of the study, additional time living in public housing or using vouchers was associated with increases in employment and earnings and decreases in welfare receipt. |
