Rebuilding the Research Capacity at HUD (2008) / Chapter Skim
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7 Evaluation of Public-Use Data Sets
7 Evaluation of Public-Use Data Sets
Pages 113-138
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From page 113... ...
This chapter focuses heavily on the role of PD&R's public-use data sets in program evaluation and policy development, including the preparation of accurate information about current housing conditions, the evaluation of existing programs, and predicting the likely consequences of future policies. The chapter devotes most attention to two data sets -- those of the American Housing Survey (AHS)
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From page 114... ...
fLIHTC data set. gResidential Finance Survey.
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From page 115... ...
For example, there were more than 3 million hits in 2007 on SOCDS, more than 2 million hits on the files containing the 2007 income limits for HUD programs, and more than 1 million hits on the files reporting and documenting the 2007 fair market rents in HUD's Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program. PD&R plays the major role in HUD in providing data for public use. Most of PD&R's public-use data sets are available at no cost from its website, HUD USER.
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From page 116... ...
Some of PD&R's data sets are primarily intended for the use of people involved in the operation of HUD programs and the housing and community development programs of other agencies. For example, data on fair market rents are used mainly in the administration of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program; annual adjustment factors are used in the administration of HUD programs that subsidize privately owned low-income housing projects; a list of metropolitan areas and particular census tracts in other locations where larger subsidies are provided for low-income housing tax-credit projects is used by project developers and program administrators; and income limits in different localities are used to determine eligibility for various HUD and non-HUD housing programs.
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From page 117... ...
The production and public availability of many PD&R data sets is necessary for the administration of HUD programs. Other PD&R public-use data sets are essential for policy development.
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From page 118... ...
The AHS has been used to estimate the effects of existing programs and to predict the effects of proposed programs. To give a few examples, it has been used to estimate the effects of public housing and housing vouchers on the nature of the housing occupied by recipients of housing assistance; the cost-effectiveness of alternative methods for delivering housing assistance; the effects of the affordable housing goals of government sponsored enterprises (GSEs)
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From page 119... ...
One important deficiency of the AHS from the viewpoint of studying the effects of low-income housing programs is that the sample of assisted families in each program is much too small. The most recent matching of administrative records with households in the AHS to identify the type of HUD rental assistance identified 326 households living in public housing projects, 636 in privately owned subsidized projects, and 571 received housing vouchers (U.S.
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From page 120... ...
Housing subsidies from multiple sources are paid on behalf of many assisted households. For example, about 28 percent of tax-credit units receive additional development subsidies from the HUD's HOME housing block grant program, and owners of tax-credit projects received subsidies in the form of unit-based or tenant-based Section 8 assistance on behalf of 40 percent of their tenants (see Climaco, Chiarenza, and Finkel, 2006)
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From page 121... ...
Unfortunately, it would be too expensive to overcome this shortcoming on a regular basis in the AHS because respondents have no knowledge, and HUD's administrative records do not contain much of the needed information either. Although HUD's administrative records contain data on the taxpayer cost of providing vouchers to recipients who live in unsubsidized housing units, a significant minority of voucher recipients live in housing units that receive other subsidies as well, such as units in tax credit or HOME projects.
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From page 122... ...
Topical modules typically involve asking the same respondents additional questions. A particularly promising variant on the theme of increasing the use of topical modules would be to collect selected AHS data on members of a subset of the households who move from units in the AHS sample in some year.
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From page 123... ...
For other types of studies, the effects of the cutbacks have been substantial. To the extent that it is desirable to know housing conditions in particular metropolitan areas or the effects of housing programs in these areas, only the AHS metropolitan sample has enough observations to produce a reliable picture, especially for subsets of the population in these areas.
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From page 124... ...
Residential Finance Survey The RFS has been conducted as a supplement to the decennial census, usually a year later, in each decade since 1950. It draws on the census list of housing units to create a sample of properties.
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From page 125... ...
At the same time, however, it is an odd time to eliminate the only survey that provides data on home mortgages from both the homeowner and the lender, in the midst of intense public policy concern over the crisis in the subprime mortgage market and growing concerns about predatory lending. SURVEYS OF CURRENT HOUSING MARKET ACTIVITY PD&R's second largest expenditure on data is for a set of monthly or quarterly reports on housing construction and related activity, which are published by the Census Bureau.
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From page 126... ...
For example, about 28 percent of tax-credit units receive development subsidies from HUD's HOME housing block grant program. These additional development subsidies account for one-third of total development subsidies (Cummings and DiPasquale, 1999)
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From page 127... ...
For example, it has been used in studies that require information on the number of subsidized households in each geographic area. The LIHTC data set provides this information at many convenient levels of geography including at the level of longitude and latitude.
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From page 128... ...
Determining the magnitudes of the other development subsidies would be more difficult: it would require combining data from the LIHTC data set with data from multiple HUD and non-HUD administrative data sets. The shortcomings of the LIHTC data set for policy analysis are not limited to the absence of information about the magnitudes of subsidies associated with tax-credit units.
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From page 129... ...
data base provides summary statistics on the characteristics of HUD-assisted households from two sources: HUD's Multifamily Tenant Characteristics System (MTCS) , which covers public housing tenants and housing voucher recipients, and the Tenant Rental Assistance Certification System (TRACS)
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From page 130... ...
The RCR provides almost as much information about public housing t enants and voucher recipients as the PSH. However, the RCR is not a substitute for the PSH because it does not contain information about occupants of privately owned, HUD-subsidized projects, it does not report HUD's subsidy on behalf of public housing tenants and voucher recipients, and it does not provide analysts with an electronic version of the entire data set.
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From page 131... ...
STATE OF THE CITIES DATA SYSTEM The SOCDS compiles data on urban and metropolitan areas from multiple public sources. Data available through SOCDS include demographic and economic data from the census, unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (through October 2007)
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From page 132... ...
This might represent an opportunity to eliminate the duplication by a consolidation of it and SOCDS. DATA ACCESS AND AVAILABILITY Administrative Data on HUD-Assisted Households One issue that arose in the committee's deliberations was the possibility of making HUD's administrative data on individual households and dwelling units available as public-use data sets.
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From page 133... ...
Many other government agencies and organizations have found ways to routinely provide such data sets on individual households to researchers in ways that protect confidential information about households from abuse. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, for example, provides each household's census tract, as well as its personal information, to researchers who sign confidentiality agreements designed to avoid abuse of this information.
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From page 134... ...
ICPSR's core mission is to "acquire and preserve social science data," and it is particularly interested in data arising from survey research and administrative records. ICPSR follows established practices for protecting the confidentiality of research subjects. Although ICPSR prefers data bases that are accompanied by comprehensive technical documentation, it will consider "lower quality data" if they have "unique historical value." ICPSR also offers significant value added by pre When almost all research uses of a data set require information on the location of the household at a small level of geography, an unrestricted public-use data set may be of little value; in these cases, it may make sense to produce only a restricted-use version of the data set.
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From page 135... ...
Before HUD stopped collecting this information, it was used in several studies to greatly reduce the bias and increase the precision of estimates of the effects of low-income housing programs on the desirability of the housing occupied and the recipients' expenditure on other goods (see Murray, 1975)
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From page 136... ...
Most importantly, the AHS is the only national data set that contains detailed information about the characteristics of dwelling units. Despite its many virtues, the AHS has some serious limitations for program evaluation and policy development: most important, it does not accurately identify the type of housing assistance received by each household and its sample of subsidized households is too small.
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From page 137... ...
It would be very expensive to overcome this deficiency by adding the necessary information for each project to the LIHTC data set. The best approach to using the data set for program evaluation would be to use information on addresses of tax credit projects to append the information in the LIHTC data set to other information on the households and housing units in the AHS.
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From page 138... ...
Recommendation 7-5: PD&R should assign a high priority to the production of an up-to-date PSH. Recommendation 7-6: PD&R should produce a public-use version of HUD's administrative data sets that provide information on the characteristics of HUD-assisted households, and it should develop procedures for providing access to a restricted-use version of the data set that contains more detailed information about household location to any reputable researcher.
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