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Subsidized Housing and the Transition to Adulthood

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Demography

Abstract

Despite abundant evidence about the effect of children’s socioeconomic circumstances on their transition to adulthood, we know much less about the effect of social policy programs aimed at poor families with children in facilitating how and when children become adults. This issue is particularly important for the U.S. federal subsidized housing program given its long history of placing subsidized units in some of the poorest and most racially segregated neighborhoods. Using counterfactual causal methods that adjust for the length of receipt of subsidized housing, I estimate the effect of subsidized housing on teenage parenthood, household formation, and educational attainment. I find that the subsidized housing program has either null or positive effects on the transition to adulthood and that these effects vary by both race and gender. These results underscore the importance of considering whether social programs have differential effects on the life chances of individuals based on both race and gender.

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Notes

  1. See Online Resource 1 for description of income eligibility limits.

  2. In 1981, Congress gave priority to households with incomes below 50 % of the Area Median Income (AMI). In 1998, Congress instituted new requirements for public housing, stipulating that no less than 40 % of new entrants should have incomes below 30 % of AMI (Schwartz 2015).

  3. When they enter subsidized housing, 84 % of black children and 74 % of nonblack children live in households with incomes below the 50 % threshold. Households in privately managed subsidized housing have somewhat higher incomes compared with those in public housing (see Table 2) but are only 3 percentage points more likely to be over the 50 % threshold compared with those in public housing.

  4. All households in the PSID who enter subsidized housing have incomes below the 80 % threshold. When they enter subsidized housing, 57 % of black households and 43 % of nonblack households have incomes below the 30 % threshold.

  5. See Online Resource 1 for description of FMRs.

  6. Almost all the nonblack children are non-Hispanic white. I reestimated all models for nonblack children excluding those who are not non-Hispanic white and reached the same substantive conclusions.

  7. The footnote of Online Resource Table S8 lists the associated unweighted observations.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge Jennie Brand, David Grusky, Robert Mare, Judith Seltzer, members of the UCLA Demography, Family and Stratification Research Group, members of the Stanford Workshop on Inequality, four anonymous reviewers, and the journal Editors for helpful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. This research was supported by a grant from The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The City College of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, NAC 6/108D, New York, NY, 10031, USA

    Yana Kucheva

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Kucheva, Y. Subsidized Housing and the Transition to Adulthood. Demography 55, 617–642 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0656-9

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