New Study on How Often People Find Homes with Housing Help
- Author: Erika Thompson
- Posted: 2025-07-31
The term “success rates” is used to talk about how often people with new vouchers can find and rent a home. When the success rate is low, it means a lot of families are struggling to use their vouchers before they expire.
This not only makes things tough for these families but also creates extra work for the public housing agencies (PHAs) that have to give out the vouchers again to other families. There's a lot of interest in figuring out these success rates, but usually, it's been hard and expensive to gather this information.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) funded a study by the New York University (NYU) Furman Center to see if existing records could help understand success rates better across the country and for individual PHAs. The study aimed to dig into the challenges and opportunities of measuring how often people successfully find housing with a voucher.
The study, finished in April 2025 and titled "Success Rates in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: 2018–2022," was led by Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O'Regan, and Sarah Strochak from the Furman Center.
They shared their findings, including data on how many people searched for homes, how long they looked, and how successful they were, from 2018 to 2022.
What They Found:
- Success Rates Dropped: The study showed that the number of people who managed to rent a home with their voucher dropped from about 65% in the first three years to 58% in the last two.
- Looking Took Longer: The time it took for voucher holders to find and rent a home got longer over the five years.
- Big Differences in Places: Success varied a lot depending on whether you were in a rural or urban area, with cities generally doing better.
- High Rent, Slightly Better Odds: Surprisingly, areas with higher rent saw slightly better success rates, though the waits were longer.
- Certain Agencies Did Better: Agencies part of the 'Moving to Work' group had higher success rates, even when most areas saw drops.
Looking Ahead
This research shows that it’s possible to use existing records to track how well the voucher program is working nationally and at the local level every year. It found some worrying trends, like longer search times and dropping success rates from 2018 to 2022.
The results point out how important it is to keep an eye on these numbers and suggest that we need to learn more about why these trends are happening. This could help make sure the program does its job: helping families find homes they can afford.
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