Howard Husock and Bruce Meyer explain why American housing policy could benefit from a form of welfare reform.
In 1983, Harvard scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood sought to determine the length of time participants in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) spent in the program. Their report, titled The Dynamics of Dependence, revealed that the average participant could be expected to remain in AFDC for 10 years — a figure that increased to 11.6 years when accounting for multiple spells. These findings helped shape the debate that culminated in the 1996 welfare-reform law, which sought to decrease long-term dependency by imposing a five-year lifetime limit on welfare receipts.
Government housing programs have largely escaped the kind of policy reevaluation that reshaped cash welfare in the 1990s, even as they have grown to surpass cash welfare in scale and scope. Today, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (which replaced AFDC) and the Supplemental Security Income program serve 2.8 million and 7.4 million beneficiaries, respectively. As of 2024, housing subsidies go to over 9 million beneficiaries.
Recently, however, data made available to the American Enterprise Institute through a research request filed with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has enabled us to estimate the likely duration of a spell in public and government-subsidized housing for both new entrants and the existing tenant population. To do so, we took advantage of a key feature of housing programs: To remain eligible, tenants must apply annually for recertification. This requirement allowed us to observe households regularly over the course of their tenure.
Our analysis, covering roughly 4.5 million households, found that a majority of tenant spells in public and government-subsidized housing extend beyond the 10-year average spells of welfare receipts identified by Bane and Ellwood. Moreover, this occurs in many households whose head is not in the workforce or seeking work, despite being neither elderly nor disabled.
Allowing such long spells for individuals who might otherwise find employment discourages their upward mobility and keeps other needy households on waiting lists. Establishing time limits for tenants with the capacity to work could help allocate scarce housing resources more effectively while encouraging greater self-sufficiency.
