Whom Do We Serve? Refining Public Housing Agency Service Areas
Knowing public housing authority/agency (PHA) service areas is important for understanding the neighborhoods that housing choice voucher holders can most easily reach and for evaluating programmatic reforms and new laws. However, no centralized database on PHA service areas exists, and the information is not always available on PHA websites. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has developed a set of estimated service areas, but they often differ significantly from areas reported on individual PHA websites or fail to capture a large share of voucher activity. In this article, the authors provide a new methodology for improving the coverage of HUD estimated service areas.
Although the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is a federal program, it is managed by more than 3,300 public housing authorities/agencies (PHAs), each with its own jurisdictional boundaries, or service areas. Although technically, voucher holders can use their vouchers to lease a home anywhere in the United States, using vouchers outside the service area of the issuing PHA can be administratively burdensome. Knowing PHA service areas is thus necessary or understanding the choices presented to HCV holders and for estimating the impacts of programmatic reforms and new laws.
One of the primary goals of the HCV program is to help participants move to higher-opportunity, lower-poverty neighborhoods. However, considerable evidence indicates that it is failing to promote this type of mobility (Ellen, 2020; Galvez, 2010; McClure, Schwartz, and Taghavi, 2015; Wood, Turnham, and Mills, 2008). Garboden (2021) points to administrative boundaries being part of this problem. He finds that voucher holders predominantly move within service areas and that cross-service area moves are extremely rare. His analysis shows that service area boundaries are more salient than either county or municipal boundaries. Knowing service area boundaries can shed light on restrictions on voucher holders’ choices and show how coordination and cooperation among PHAs can overcome those barriers.
Knowing a PHA’s service area is also key to understanding and evaluating the effects of policies like Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) and source of income (SOI) discrimination laws. For example, the introduction of SAFMRs could have different implications for PHAs serving primarily low-rent or high-rent ZIP Codes (Dastrup et al., 2018). Consider also that SOI discrimination laws are enacted by counties and municipalities (not housing agencies), so identifying which counties and municipalities fall within a PHA’s service area is important. Finally, knowing PHA service areas is necessary for creating the data and maps that HUD committed to providing to PHAs and the public as part of its recently reintroduced 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. However, no centralized source of information on PHA service areas exists, and few PHAs clearly identify their service areas on their websites.
The authors used administrative HCV data from 2017 to address these delineation problems by modifying HUD’s estimated service areas into “revised service areas,” which better capture most of the voucher activity for PHAs.
