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Expanding Access to Rental Assistance: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go From Here?

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Research has shown that rental assistance is a powerful tool for address- ing housing cost burden, instability, and other housing and non-housing outcomes. Rental subsidies can also be leveraged to increase housing supply and quality. Despite these realities, we have functioned within a solutions framework that is often constrained by funding, and most changes to the program have been slight adjustments to current federal approaches. In this paper, we offer an assessment of what is known about rental assistance and thoughts on ways to improve and expand it.

In recent years, strong demand for rental properties, a shortage of housing, and rising rents have led to an affordability crisis for renters across the income spectrum. In 2023, 22.6 million renter households—approximately half of all renters—were cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent and utilities. Over 12 million households spent more than half of their incomes on housing (Airgood-Obrycki et  al., 2024). High housing costs and rent burdens force households to make tradeoffs between paying for housing and other essential goods such as healthcare and food (Airgood-Obrycki et  al., 2023; Angst et  al., 2023; Meltzer & Schwartz, 2016), increase households’ exposure to housing instability and eviction (Graetz et  al., 2024), and are associated with homelessness.

Given that context, this paper focuses on expanding access to rental assistance. Research has shown that rental assistance is a powerful tool for addressing housing cost burden, instability and an array of housing and non-housing outcomes. Rental subsidies can also be leveraged to increase housing supply and quality. Drawing from experiments to improve the delivery and impact of rental assistance, more could be done with the existing subsidies as well. That said, we have functioned within a solutions framework that is often constrained by funding, with only one in four or five households eligible for rental assistance receiving it (Acosta & Gartland, 2021), and most changes to the program have been slight adjustments to current approaches. In this paper, we offer thoughts on how to improve

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Housing Choice Vouchers (% of occupied, privately owned rental units)

This indicator measures the share of all rental households in privately owned units whose occupants use a housing choice voucher from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Because tenants cannot use their vouchers to rent units in public housing, we report this indicator as a percentage of occupied, privately owned rental units. The denominator consists of occupied rental housing units (that is, rental households) from the American Community Survey (ACS) minus the total number of public housing units. For more information about the calculation of this indicator, see the “Housing Choice Vouchers” section of the Methods section. Due to inconsistencies in data collection and reporting before 2009 from the Picture of Subsidized Households, the source of housing choice voucher data, we do not present this indicator before 2009.

Sources: Picture of Subsidized Households, American Community Survey, New York City Housing Authority, NYU Furman Center