Study Finds Little Evidence of LIHTC Impact on Neighborhood Mobility

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications recently released a new working paper titled “The Effect of Low-Income Housing on Neighborhood Mobility: Evidence from Linked Micro-Data.” The paper assesses the impact of LIHTC developments on neighborhood mobility patterns.

While subsidized low-income housing construction provides affordable living conditions for poor households, a concern is that building low-income housing in poor communities induces individuals to move to poor neighborhoods. The paper examines this issue using a national dataset based on 2000 and 2010 censuses that provided individual-level data, HUD data on LIHTC properties to measure the extent of LIHTC development in neighborhoods, and census data to determine neighborhood characteristics.

The authors tracked residents who changed neighborhoods between 2000 and 2010. The analysis revealed that LIHTC construction did not appear to incentivize households to move into lower income neighborhoods more than they would have otherwise. This finding was observed for households at all income levels. The authors also found that LIHTC construction did not appear to significantly alter neighborhoods in terms of racial or ethnic composition, poverty rate, median income, or the homeownership rate.