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Publications on Housing

This report provides a policy-oriented conceptual framework that has the potential to explain saving and asset accumulation across the entire population and to account for the low levels of saving and asset accumulation in the low-income population. The report also reviews empirical evidence that supports or challenges this framework.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration in 1994 in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. MTO targeted families living in some of the nation’s poorest, highest-crime communities and used housing subsidies to offer them a chance to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. Research on the families conducted in 2002 raised some important questions about the impact of the program. Findings from the follow up Three-City Study of MTO, in 2004 and 2005, answer some of the questions but also highlight the complexity of the MTO experience and the limitations of a relocation-only strategy in being able to bring about fundamental changes in the lives of very low income families.

Single-family home prices in the District of Columbia rose nearly 7 percent between the second quarters of 2006 and 2007 despite a decline in sales volume, according to the latest issue of District of Columbia Housing Monitor. Prices of condominiums declined slightly.

The District of Columbia Housing Monitor provides a quarterly look at the Washington, D.C., housing market, tracking home prices, real estate listings, new construction, and affordable housing. This issue's special section provides the most extensive tracking to date of the city's subsidized affordable housing stock, reporting numbers of units by location, program type, ownership, and expiration of affordability restrictions.

One expected benefit of moving poor families from the concentrated poverty of some inner city neighborhoods to better, less poor neighborhoods, was that the children would attend better schools, with more resources and more advantaged peers who might be models for hard work and higher achievement. This brief looks at the schools MTO children attended after their move, how they did or did not differ from the schools in their pre-move neighborhoods, and what factors mattered to families choosing schools for their children.