Comparing the effects of housing vouchers versus public housing on the health of vulnerable individuals and families

The Foundation's initiative, Evidence for Action: Investigator-Initiated Research to Build a Culture of Health, was designed to support investigator-initiated research projects that support the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's work with a Culture of Health.This research will provide evidence about the effects of housing voucher and public housing programs on the health outcomes of vulnerable individuals and families. The study takes advantage of a natural experiment of a randomized housing lottery which produced random offers of public housing or housing vouchers to a subset of more than 70,000 wait-list households in the Miami Public Housing and Community Development housing assistance lottery. Researchers will link the families on the waitlist lottery to Medicaid data from 2004-2016 from Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration. Researchers will estimate both the independent and comparative effects of each program to learn about the relative effects of tenant-based versus project-based housing assistance on health. They will also investigate the possible sources behind the effects by drawing on several other data sources, including detailed neighborhood characteristics, administrative data on homelessness, and comparing effects across programs. Results will inform policymakers, public housing authorities, public health researchers, and practitioners on whether project-based or tenant-based subsidies are better at supporting the health of low-income children and adults and the trade-off between using project-based or tenant-based housing subsidies.