TBV-PBV Concentration (April, 2025)

Link to the full Policy Brief

The potential poverty-concentrating effect of increasing the project-based voucher cap

Philip Tegeler and Nineveh O’Connell

This policy brief addresses recent proposals to increase the percentage of Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) that can be “project-based” (attached to specific properties). Our concern, based on the most recently available HUD data,¹ is that project-based vouchers have a tendency to be significantly more concentrated in high poverty neighborhoods than standard tenant-based vouchers. This pattern is most pronounced in metropolitan areas with a significant percentage of high poverty neighborhoods and in highly segregated metropolitan areas. A policy shift that increases concentration in the voucher program can have negative consequences for residents,² and is also contrary to the principles of the HCV program.³ While we recognize that some of this concentration is related to the beneficial use of project-based vouchers in public housing redevelopment projects through the Rental Assistance Demonstration, further increasing the reassignment of vouchers to specific locations undermines the program’s core goal of housing choice. Existing policy allowing increased project-basing may have also contributed to the significant decrease in the percentage of families with children in the voucher program, and raising the percentage of project-based vouchers further may exacerbate an already steep decline.⁴

_________________

1. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of 2020 HUD administrative data and 2017-2021 American Community Survey data, included in summary form in Erik Gartland, Alicia Mazzara, Will Fischer and Nick Kasprak, “Where Households Using Federal Rental Assistance Live: More Can Be Done to Promote Neighborhood Choice” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 2025), https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/where-households-using-federal-rental-assistance-live
2. See Margery Austin Turner and Ruth Gourevitch, “How Neighborhoods Affect the Social and Economic Mobility of Their Residents” (U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, August 2017), https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/92956/how-neighborhoods-affect-the-social-and-economic-mobility-of-their-residents_0.pdf
3. The HCV program originated in the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, with a general statement of purpose that cited concern over the “concentration of persons of lower income in central cities,” and goals of “the reduction of the isolation of income groups within communities and geographical areas,” and “the spatial deconcentration of housing opportunities for persons of lower income.” 42 USC § 5301.
4. Alicia Mazzara, Barbara Sard, and Douglas Rice, “Rental Assistance for Families with Children at Lowest Point in Decade” (Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, 2016), https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/rental-assistance-to-families-with-children-at-lowest-point-in-decade.