Giving Compass' Take:

• MDRC shares early findings from its evaluation of Housing and Urban Development's Voluntary Family Self-Sufficiency program. 

• How can funders work to ensure that programs like this one get evaluations in a timely manner? How can this program be improved? 

• Learn about nine rules for better housing policy. 

Households receiving rental assistance are among the lowest-income and most-disadvantaged households in America. Since the mid-1980s, several U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs have attempted to blend housing assistance with a variety of support services designed to increase employment and improve the economic well-being of households receiving rental assistance. Operated since the early 1990s, the voluntary Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program is one of the main federal strategies to help housing-assisted recipients move toward self-sufficiency.

Through annual grants, HUD provides public housing agencies (PHAs) with resources for hiring FSS program coordinators who work with participating heads of households to develop self-sufficiency plans (usually covering 5 years) and refer them to services in their communities. The FSS program also includes a financial incentive to support work and help families build long-term savings; under HUD rent rules, as a household’s earned income increases, so does its share of rent. The FSS program directs an amount based on the rent increase to an interest-bearing escrow account that the PHA maintains that is disbursed to participants when they reach key employment and self-sufficiency milestones.

To learn more about the program’s effectiveness, in March 2012, HUD commissioned the first national randomized controlled trial of FSS programs. Eighteen PHAs operating small to large FSS programs for housing voucher recipients agreed to participate in the national evaluation and together enrolled 2,556 working-age housing choice voucher (HCV) holders in the study. This first report examines FSS program implementation, participants’ engagement in the program, and program impacts on labor force participation and government benefits receipt in the first 18 to 24 months after program enrollment.

Early findings:

  • PHAs have substantial discretion over FSS program implementation, leading to broad variation in case management approaches, caseload sizes, and service delivery. The escrow component is more uniformly implemented based on HUD regulations.
  • FSS participants chose to pursue a broad range of goals, including employment, education and training, financial management and security, and homeownership-related activities. Less than one-half of the participants, however, had set short-term goals—that is, goals to attain within the first year of enrollment.
  • Sixteen of the 18 PHAs expected participants to communicate with case managers quarterly or monthly. Programs generally fell short of that goal; about 27 percent of the FSS group interacted with an FSS case manager at least quarterly.
  • FSS increased participation in a range of employment-related services and support services by a statistically significant 13 percentage points more than the control group. Effects larger than 13 percentage points were seen for services related to job search or postemployment assistance, financial security, and homeownership preparation, such as attending a homeownership workshop.
  • As of month 18, 35 percent of the FSS group had a positive escrow balance. Those participants with an escrow balance had accrued an average of $1,500.
  • About 56 percent of the sample was working at study enrollment. In the two years following random assignment, employment and earnings levels increased for both research groups, but differences between the groups were small and statistically insignificant. The program led to a small shift from part-time to full-time employment. Impacts did not vary by subgroup—for example, participants who were not working or had low levels of educational attainment or those with disabilities at study enrollment.

As these early results focus on the first 18 to 24 months of a 5-year program, it is too soon to draw firm conclusions about the program’s success in helping participants move toward selfsufficiency. Future reports will update the current findings and will document the progress that enrolled FSS families are making toward the program’s long-term goals of increasing earnings, reducing reliance on government assistance, and improving material well-being.