Driving to Opportunities: Voucher Users, Cars, and Movement to Sustainable Neighborhoods

AbstractTenant-based rental vouchers have expanded housing choice for millions of low-income households, yet assisted households still face hurdles when trying to secure housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods with desirable economic, social, and environmental characteristics. Although inadequate transportation is arguably one of the most important hurdles to securing housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods, existing studies of voucher users' location choices have not yet explored the connections between transportation access and residential location outcomes. This article discusses the results from a recent study that attempts to close that gap. Our study draws on data from the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing demonstration program and the Welfare-to-Work Voucher Program, two residential mobility initiatives that randomly assigned rental vouchers to low-income households seeking housing assistance. Using a variety of approaches-including cluster analysis, bivariate comparisons, and multivariate analysis-we find evidence of important connections between automobile access and improved neighborhood conditions. We also find that neighborhoods with similar levels of poverty exhibit a wide array of other characteristics that matter differently for different kinds of households. Our findings suggest a need for more integrated and holistic planning and program development to account for the importance of both cars and transit to low-income households' well-being.Introduction and OverviewResearch on the linkages between tenant-based housing assistance and residential outcomes suggests that households receiving vouchers choose to live in a wider range of neighborhoods than public housing residents and unassisted renters (Schwartz, 2010). In the long term, however, voucher holders still face hurdles when trying to secure housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods-those with low poverty rates, high labor force participation rates, high-quality public services, convenient access to employment, and safe and healthful surroundings (Turner et al., 2011). Although transportation plays a widely recognized-even central-role in shaping residential location decisions, studies of voucher users' housing choices curiously have neglected explorations of how cars and transit contribute distinctively to neighborhood choices.This article reports partial results of a larger study designed to close that gap. It uses data from two major experiments sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the 1990s and 2000s to test whether housing choice vouchers propelled low-income households into greater economic security. The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration program and the Welfare to Work Voucher (WtWV) program sought to learn whether low-income families benefited from housing mobility through improved neighborhood conditions and better economic and health outcomes.1Our study finds important, previously unreported connections between automobiles and positive outcomes in these experiments. Automobiles increase the likelihood that voucher participants will live and remain in high-opportunity neighborhoods, a result on which this article reports in depth. Our research also shows in work published elsewhere and in a research note in the current volume of Cityscape that automobiles are associated with greater neighborhood satisfaction and improved economic outcomes.We begin our article by showing that most studies on voucher users' residential locations assess a limited number of indicators of distress and segregation and by suggesting a broader framework- based on other studies-for assessing the dimensions of neighborhood quality (which we call neighborhood sustainability). After discussing our data and methods, we present the results of two main analyses. First, we show that in the MTO and WtWV study areas, neighborhoods with similar levels of poverty have a wide array of other characteristics that matter differently for different kinds of households. …