Giving Compass' Take:

• The Housing Choice Voucher Mobility Demonstration Act of 2018 would help bring a voucher system to families in low-income areas and would give HUD the opportunity to see if these systems are successful through tiered evidence framework. 

• What are the potential pitfalls of implementing a tiered evidence framework? How would it affect the families involved if the voucher program was unsuccessful?

• Read about Brooking's ideas of what better housing policy looks like.

Living in low-poverty communities enables low-income people to improve their economic outlook. And housing vouchers, which provide assistance to families to rent from private landlords, are the most prevalent tools to enable residents to access low-poverty communities.

We know vouchers can improve life trajectories, but we don’t know how best to help voucher holders access and stay in low-poverty communities. That’s where strategic research and evaluation can help.

The Housing Choice Voucher Mobility Demonstration Act of 2018 would give the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary authority to empower some public housing agencies to use vouchers and services to help families move to low-poverty areas in their region and then test those strategies’ effectiveness.

Tiered-evidence grantmaking focuses funding on interventions with proven success while investing in new, innovative approaches. It does so through a tiered structure that expands the grant size by the rigor of the evidence backing a proposed intervention. Tiered-evidence grants require all interventions to be evaluated, which helps build their evidence base and test effective approaches in new contexts.

And while this approach could advance learning about mobility programs, it could also build the evidence base about other strategies that help families with young children access and stay in low-poverty, opportunity-rich neighborhoods.

Investing in the development of a broader evidence base would expand our understanding of the mechanisms that most effectively provide stable access to low-poverty communities and would allow HUD and others to tailor investments to evidence-based programs that demonstrate the greatest impact.

Read the full article about housing vouchers by Erika C. Poethig, Justin Milner, and Keith Fudge at Urban Institute