Capitalism and Freedom

Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in high-poverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer neighborhoods that had lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects of this intervention on adult economic self-sufficiency or physical health. Mental health benefits of the voucher offers for adults and for female youth were substantial. Beneficial effects for female youth on education, risky behavior, and physical health were offset by adverse effects for male youth. For outcomes that exhibit significant treatment effects, we find, using variation in treatment intensity across voucher types and cities, that the relationship between neighborhood poverty rate and outcomes is approximately linear.

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Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO’s impacts on children’s long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative impacts, perhaps because of disruption effects. The decline in the gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an important determinant of children’s long-term outcomes. (JEL I31, I38, J13, R23, R38)

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The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

Abiotic stresses (such as metals/metalloids, salinity, ozone, UV-B radiation, extreme temperatures and drought) are among the most challenging threats to agricultural system and economic yield of crop plants. These stresses (in isolation and/or combination) induce numerous adverse effects in plants, impair biochemical/physiological and molecular processes, and eventually cause severe reductions in plant growth, development and overall productivity. Phytohormones have been recognized as a strong tool for sustainably alleviating adverse effects of abiotic stresses in crop plants. The significance of salicylic acid (SA) has been increasingly recognized in improved plant abiotic stress-tolerance via SA-mediated control of major plant-metabolic processes. However, the basic biochemical/physiological and molecular mechanisms that potentially underpin SA-induced plant-tolerance to major abiotic stresses remain least discussed. Based on recent reports, this paper: (a) overviews historical background and biosynthesis of SA under both optimal and stressful environments in plants; (b) critically appraises the role of SA in plants exposed to major abiotic stresses; (c) cross-talks potential mechanisms those are expected to govern SA-induced plant abiotic stress-tolerance; and finally (d) briefly highlights major aspects so far unexplored in the current context.

/pdf/salicylic-acid-induced-abiotic-stress-tolerance-and-530gw94vkb.pdf

Salicylic acid-induced abiotic stress tolerance and underlying mechanisms in plants

ference of 4.61 percentage points (95% confidence interval (CI), −8.54 to −0.69), 3.38 percentage points (95% CI, −6.39 to −0.36), and 4.31 percentage points (95% CI, −7.82 to −0.80), respectively. The differences between the group receiving traditional vouchers and the control group were not significant. CONCLUSIONS The opportunity to move from a neighborhood with a high level of poverty to one with a lower level of poverty was associated with modest but potentially important reductions in the prevalence of extreme obesity and diabetes. The mechanisms under - lying these associations remain unclear but warrant further investigation, given their potential to guide the design of community-level interventions intended to improve health. (Funded by HUD and others.)

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Neighborhoods, Obesity, and Diabetes — A Randomized Social Experiment

Two important shortcomings of the official measure of poverty are its failure to account for noncash benefits (including the benefits of low-income housing programs) when calculating resources and differences in the cost-of-living across geographic areas when setting poverty thresholds. Alternative estimates of poverty rates that account for the variation in the cost-of-living across areas when setting thresholds and the value of rental housing subsidies when measuring household resources have been produced. One purpose of this chapter is to better account for these factors in poverty measurement using a much improved consumer price index for each metropolitan area and the nonmetropolitan part of each state and better estimates of the value of existing rental housing subsidies based on data from the American Housing Survey. A second purpose is to estimate the effect on poverty rates of people of various types of replacing the current system of low-income housing assistance with an equally costly entitlement housing voucher program that would offer assistance to all of the poorest people in the United States. The current system fails to offer assistance to many of the poorest people while serving many people with much higher incomes.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1895417

Geographical Price Variation, Housing Assistance, and Poverty

The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program (MTO) has estimated the effects of two concrete reforms of low-income housing policy on one important group affected by them. Reforms of this type have received, and will continue to receive, serious consideration in housing policy debates. At this stage, it is not feasible to estimate the effects of the MTO reforms on all of the people significantly affected by them. However, it is feasible and desirable to estimate the effects of two similar reforms that would have almost the same effect on the families studied in MTO. These reforms would have no effect on the number of families that receive housing assistance. Instead, they would affect the nature of the housing assistance offered and the taxpayer cost of providing it. One alternative would almost surely have generated cost savings and additional revenue exceeding the cost of the vouchers, thereby providing greater benefits than the current system at a lower taxpayer cost. The MTO results supplemented with estimates of their taxpayer cost would provide a reasonably comprehensive analysis of their effects. This commentary suggests how the taxpayer costs of the alternative reforms might be estimated. Doing it would significantly increase the value of MTO research for housing policy development.

Increasing the Value of MTO Research for Housing Policy Development

In 1975 HUD began the Section 8 Existing Housing Program, which provides subsidies to low-income families living in privately owned rental housing that meets certain standards. It has grown to become the second largest low-income rental program in the United States, surpassed only by Low-Income Public Housing. Under the program, local Public Housing Agencies (PHA) issue certificates to four-person families having incomes less than 80% of the area's median. The upper-income limit is higher for larger families and lower for smaller families. Funds are not sufficient to cover all eligible households. A certificate holder has 60 days to find a unit that meets specified quality standards and rents for less than the regional "fair market rent" (FMR) ceiling. FMR's are higher for dwellings with more bedrooms; family size determines the minimum and maximum number of bedrooms allowed. The low-income tenant must pay the landlord at most 25% of his income, and the PHA pays the remaining portion of the gross rent. If the tenant finds a unit renting below the FMR, he may deduct a fraction of the difference in rents from his maximum payment of 25% of his income. In 1976 HUD commissioned a nationwide evaluation of the Section 8 Existing Housing Program (Drury et al. 1978). The nationwide evaluation revealed a substantial increase in gross rents for "stayers" whose preprogram housing required no repairs to meet the minimum quality standards. The increase in rent ranged from an average $101 for stayers having low preprogram rent ($5-$50) to an average $7 for stayers having high preprogram rent (over $150). The average increase in rent to all stayers whose units required no initial repairs was $33, or an increase of 26% (Drury et al. 1978, pp. 64-66). This finding has been interpreted to mean that Section 8 is paying rents higher than the mean of comparable unsubsidized units. Such an interpretation is inconsistent with the results of studies of the Section 23 Existing Housing Program, Section 8's predecessor. These studies found essentially no difference between the rents paid for units under the program and the mean rents of unsubsidized units with the same characteristics. (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 1974, pp. 126-27; Morrall and Olsen 1980, p. 162; Mayo et al. 1979, pp. 129174).1 The Section 23 Existing Housing Program was quite similar to Section 8 but provided a recipient with a smaller incentive to find a bargain or resist a rent increase. Under Section 8, the greater the total rent payment to the landlord,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3145790

Does HUD Pay Too Much for Section 8 Existing Housing

The empirical literature is unanimous in finding that tenant-based housing certificates and vouchers provide housing of any quality at a much lower total cost (that is, cost to all levels of government and tenants) than the types of project-based assistance studied, namely Public Housing, Section 236, and Section 8 New Construction and Substantial Rehab. However, these studies are so old and inaccessible that they are unknown to most people involved in current discussions of housing policy. This paper discusses the theoretical reasons to expect that these types of project-based housing programs will have excessive costs, presents a conceptually correct methodology for the cost-effectiveness analysis of housing programs, and provides a description and critical appraisal of the data and methods used in these earlier studies as well as a summary of their results. It concludes that cost-effectiveness analyses of current forms of projectbased housing assistance should be the highest priority for research on housing policy.

The Cost-Effectiveness of Alternative Methods of Delivering Housing Subsidies

Small Area Fair Market Rents is an important reform of HUD's Housing Choice Voucher Program. One argument for them is that they would reduce overpayment for voucher units in low-rent neighborhoods. This leads to the belief that the benefits of SAFMRs can be funded largely by reductions in landlord profits rather than by losses to voucher recipients who remain in low-rent areas. The usual theoretical argument that has led many to believe that voucher units are overpriced focuses on one implication of one feature of the Housing Choice Voucher program. This article provides a more comprehensive theoretical analysis that leads to the conclusion that the worst voucher units and those in the worst neighborhoods will usually rent for more than the mean market rent of identical units, and the best units in the best neighborhoods will rent for less than this amount. The debate over this matter has ignored the bulk of the available evidence. This article summarizes and assesses the data, methods, and results of the major studies. The evidence is consistent with the general pattern predicted by the comprehensive theoretical analysis but also with an alternative explanation that challenges its interpretation as overpayments and underpayments for voucher units. The mix of units with estimated overpayments and underpayments varies across studies, but the weight of the evidence is that the aggregate differences are modest. Finally, the evidence available indicates that SAFMRs will decrease the rents paid for voucher units with any specified set of characteristics in the worst neighborhoods and will increase the rents of such units in the best neighborhoods.

Edgar O. Olsen

Papers

Geographical Price Variation, Housing Assistance, and Poverty

Increasing the Value of MTO Research for Housing Policy Development

Does HUD Pay Too Much for Section 8 Existing Housing

The Cost-Effectiveness of Alternative Methods of Delivering Housing Subsidies

Does HUD Overpay for Voucher Units, and Will SAFMRs Reduce the Overpayment?