Leveraging accessibility modeling to improve housing equity for low-income assisted renters: A case study in Bridgeport, Connecticut

Abstract

The Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP) in the United States assists low-income households with a rent voucher to be redeemed in the private rental market. However, public housing authorities in certain states, such as Connecticut, may impose geographic restrictions that we coin as the “same-jurisdiction rule,” when implementing the HCVP. In practice, this constraint is translated to the requirement that assisted households must lease up within the same jurisdiction, which may eventually restrict access to high-quality housing or prevent relocation to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. To identify ways for policy improvement, we adopt the two-step floating catchment area method to evaluate the accessibility to HCVP-eligible housing in Bridgeport, Connecticut with and without the same-jurisdiction rule. The results indicate that when the geographic restrictions are lifted, there is a 9.23 % increase in median accessibility, and the increase is more significant in low-accessibility areas, which are often lower-opportunity neighborhoods. The results suggest that removing the same-jurisdiction rule can result in more housing options and thus improve housing equity for assisted renters. Since the HCVP and other rental assistance programs are spatial-driven, we call for establishing an operational workflow to corroborate the rigor of these programs to improve housing equity for low-income households.