In conversation with Eva Rosen
Eva Rosen began her research on housing voucher holders a decade ago. In order to fully understand the significance and processes behind this federal housing program, she moved to Park Heights, Baltimore, for more than a year. The result of this deeply researched ethnographic investigation is The Voucher Promise, recently published by Princeton University Press, where Rosen focuses on the rarely heard voices of voucher holders and landlords.
In this interview, GGCI Faculty Director, Uwe Brandes, and Professor Rosen held a conversation which included an overview of her research motivations, methods and findings.
Uwe Brandes (UB): I think a lot of people hear the word housing voucher, and they don't actually know what it is. Can you start off by explaining what is the significance of a housing voucher to a family?
Eva Rosen (ER): People describe it as like winning the lottery. And in fact, it is a lottery that only about one in four renters who need housing assistance gets. It's a really big deal when you get this voucher.
On top of that, it allows families to at least make some kind of decision about where they want to live. And so, people pay 30% of their income in rent and the rest is paid by the federal government. What the studies show is that when people get the subsidy, they buy more food, they pay for their kids’ education, they pay for a car to be able to go to work every day. Studies also show that it reduces homelessness, improves affordability, and alleviates overcrowding. The kinds of changes that you see in spending patterns are really the kinds of changes that we would hope to see, and they suggest that this subsidy is improving households’ basic quality of life.
The other thing that it does, I learned from my own work, even when vouchers don’t provide total choice, they provide flexibility. This means that if you get a new job that's in a different part of the city, or if your kid is getting bullied at school or if there's a lot of violence in your neighborhood and you want to move, it provides the ability to move out in a way that simply wasn't possible in public housing and also isn't possible for a lot of poor people who don’t hold vouchers. That idea of flexibility is really important to people, they feel this is a big thing in their lives that they are incredibly grateful for.
UB: Why did you choose to focus your research on it?
ER: I think that housing policy in general is a really interesting case where it can be both a solution and a cause to many of the problems we care about: poverty, inequality, racial segregation, wealth building, mental health, and family stability, among others. So, housing policy is a set of tools to address these problems, but, at the same time, it is the cause of many of these inequalities and we're learning more and more about this. In the last few years several authors have really shown how currently and historically, policies that we have actually shaped the way the world looks today in a really unfavorable way. So, housing policy is both a tool and something to blame for the state of affairs, and this duality has always really intrigued me. The voucher program is the perfect example of this duality.
UB: The Housing Choice Voucher Program is an over 40-year old subsidy program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. What are the primary findings of your research?
ER: The Voucher Program was created during the Nixon administration and the idea was that it would be more economically efficient than public housing. The private market would take advantage of the private housing stock and the fleet of private landlords who were already doing this work and perhaps were better suited to do it then the federal government was. It's a very attractive idea, particularly when you look at what the state of public housing was at a time. Today we face a situation where the program is similar to what it was in the 70s, just bigger. When you think about the outcomes of the voucher program, it has mirrored the problems that we see in the private market, such as intensified segregation and concentrated poverty. We sort of have to ask, well, why wouldn't it? It is the private market.
While the program was originally designed to help people afford their homes, and I think it does that really well, policymakers have come to hope that because it has this opportunity for choice, it might remedy some of the problems of past housing programs. So, they were expecting that it might allow people to choose to move to higher income neighborhoods, or that we might see some desegregation. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. We see that voucher holders have a really hard time using their vouchers because there's a lot of stigma around the program. Some landlords, especially in more affluent or more white neighborhoods, just don't accept vouchers. Secondly, there aren't always enough affordable units. The units that are affordable tend to be in more disadvantaged places. There are really big discrepancies by race, so voucher holders of color live in very different neighborhoods than white voucher holders. It’s not worsening the previous situation, but we're not seeing that it has produced any different outcomes.
What I also learned is that landlords were not just these benign, managers of housing. They were really channeling tenants into these neighborhoods in a way that undermines the tenants’ ability to make a full choice. Landlords were standing outside the Housing Authority Office, waiting for new voucher holders to come out and offering them a product right there. They would offer tenants a ride up to this neighborhood -most tenants don't own cars-, a waiver of the security deposit, a move-in cash bonus, or they might even offer them to choose the color on the walls. And they come up and they see this house and its newly renovated and it's ready to pass inspection…but they're not really taking a look at the whole neighborhood, and they don’t have time to notice the vacant unit on the end of the block or to check the crime statistics for the neighborhood. So, landlords shape the options and even the preferences of tenants, channeling tenants into these neighborhoods.
UB: You are an urban sociologist and last year you co-organized The Sociology of Housing event. How does your discipline shape the way you approach the study of housing?
ER: I think that sociologists have certain tools to understand the mechanisms of inequality that are particular. Ethnographic and qualitative methods, which of course is not all of sociology, are certainly tools that I learned as a sociologist. I do think that having moved to the neighborhood for over a year and really getting to know people, learning about their life histories, learning about how they got to the neighborhood, what that decision making process looked like, what kinds of constraints were on their decisions, really helped me to understand the whole picture.
Maybe there are other fields that would have these tools as well, but as a sociologist, I was able to realize that there was a missing actor in the process. By focusing solely on tenant choice, which is what the literature does, you end up assuming that voucher holders are making a choice, but that choice is taking place within a context within a set of constraints. So, I was able to quickly pivot and say, oh, I need to study the landlords too, this is a part of the picture. This is what Desmond would have called Relational Ethnography: studying all of the relevant relationships and people that are involved to produce a certain outcome. It's not just the tenants that produce this outcome. It's also the housing markets, the landlords, the housing policies, the neighborhood associations.
UB: Pivoting into research methodology, you are a champion of qualitative research (you also teach a class on that). Can you explain how qualitative methods helped you to advance your research?
ER: I think qualitative research helps us plug holes. Quantitative research requires us to make strict sets of assumptions and it requires us to rely on existing literature to set up our models. Often that existing literature is robust, and it tells us exactly what we need to know to figure out which variables we need and how they're related to each other. So, you plug it in and get your data and it's good.
Qualitative research really requires you to think “well, what assumptions did we make there? What variables might we have missed? Is this the direction of causality or is that the direction of causality? What's the order of events here? What are we missing?”. So, for topics that we don't know a lot about, you kind of have to start with qualitative research to figure out the lay of the land. Vouchers are something we don't know everything about, and in particular one thing we know very little about is landlords. To even know what to look at, I think you really need to start on the ground. If I weren't on the ground, talking to families meeting with them getting to know their lives, I don't think it would have occurred to me that this was an important factor. So yes, qualitative research helps you see the bigger picture.
UB: When we think of cities today, in this moment specially, we're thinking a lot about social equity and racial segregation. What do we know and what don’t we know? What are the research questions that are in your mind these days?
ER: One interesting avenue of research is the historical mechanisms of inequality and segregation that still have repercussions today and may or may not still be operating today. Recent authors like Richard Rothstein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor or Matthew Desmond are looking at hidden local, but also federal, policies that really created the world we live in today, that people broadly don't seem to know about. Examples of this are the banking industry, the real estate industry, and zoning laws, which some of them have been reverted, but a lot of them still exist.
The second bucket is thinking about more overt forms of discrimination that persist and trying to measure that discrimination. There are audit studies that send out two testers of different races to the same property and see what happens when they apply for a property. We can also do things like the work that I'm doing now with landlords, and actually just talking to them and you learn all kinds of things about the way they discriminate, when you watch how they screen tenants. The inequalities in the screening become really, really obvious.
UB: Cities with the pandemic are having all kinds of unusual impacts, and there's an enormous economic impact to communities. And on top of that we are a couple of months before the election. You’re a professor at the McCourt School so I’m going to ask you if you could put your policy hat on. What are you looking at right now in terms of policy making?
ER: I am looking at housing policy. I think that, for the first time in a long-time, housing is front and center. The number of people who are facing housing instability is just higher than it's ever been. Even some people who thought they would never have a chance of losing their home, are facing that possibility. Housing assistance already was only helping one in four, and now we're facing huge proportions of people who are going to need help in the coming months. An eviction moratorium is great, but it only puts a band-aid on the problem, because people are just accumulating the rent that they're not going to be able to pay whenever that moratorium is lifted.
I'm looking at programs like Biden's proposed housing program that expands vouchers more broadly to everyone who needs them. I think that this is a more sustainable way to help people who need homes, than to offer them emergency assistance. There are specific things that I do think need to be done if we're going to expand the program to a universal program, but the fact that that's on the table is huge. I'm looking forward to seeing where that plan goes, and I hope that they will read my book and learn about some of the ways in which I think we should improve the program before we scale it up.