Impacts of housing assistance on economic self-sufficiency: Incomes and earnings among conventional public housing and housing choice voucher families in New York City

This dissertation used data of the Multifamily Tenant Characteristics System files from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The dataset contains household information of Conventional Public Housing (CPH) and Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) programs of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in the years from 2003 to 2009. Propensity score matching was used in order to minimize selection bias and to select the valid comparison groups between the CPH and HCV households. Longitudinal research, descriptive analysis, linear regression, logistic regression and geographic information system (GIS) analyses were used to test and find out the differences and similarities between the CPH and HCV households regarding their employment obtainment, income, wage and welfare exit. The dissertation found that the CPH households maintained higher average incomes and wages during the years 2003 to 2009, and attained on average higher welfare exit rates than their HCV counterparts in 2009. It also found that NYCHA's policies on admission, rent charging, retention and provision of residents' supportive services vary between the CPH and HCV programs, and the support for achieving employment and welfare exit seemed to be stronger for the former. The GIS analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of CPH and HCV households were residing very close to public transit stations (i.e. within 5 minutes or less walking time). The easy accessibility to public transportation enabled both program residents to commute to work and/or training conveniently. The findings support the argument in the dissertation that despite the conventional belief that the HCV program offers more mobility than the CPH program for their residents in reaching jobs and supportive services, this is not the case in New York City. The offer of residential mobility in NYCHA HCV is not more effective than the NYCHA CPH in helping their residents in attaining jobs, or obtaining community resource opportunities. The results suggest that policymakers need to preserve and strengthen the aging NYCHA CPH developments, and to offer more incentives to assist HCV households to attain economic self-sufficiency.