Last November, 60% of Richmond voters approved Measure L, which enacted local rent control and just cause eviction protections. The ordinance set up a Rent Board to decide on important regulatory issues and a Rent Program to administer the new system. One of the important questions facing the program is whether and how to regulate affordable housing, which represents over 20% of the city’s rental stock (a far higher share than other cities). This question is the basis of my Client Report capstone. Before making policy recommendations, I first wanted to understand the particular vulnerability and challenges facing Richmond renters. I therefore analyzed and visualized data from the Rent Program about affordable housing developments, data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) about the concentration of subsidized units, and two datasets related to health burdens and outcomes.
Types of Affordable Housing in Richmond
As the first chart below shows, Richmond’s affordable housing stock includes a range of financing sources and subsidies, including HUD Section 8 vouchers and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) . Section 8 vouchers are categorized as project-based (attached to a specific development) or tenant-based, meaning voucher holders have to search for housing on the private market. In addition, Richmond has around 2,700 LIHTC units. This is the primary way that affordable housing is financed in Richmond, and in fact, across the country. Because of the income requirements, LIHTC tends to exclude people with very low incomes. This is different from Section 8, which requires households to pay 30% of their income to rent and subsidizes the rest. However, developers will often layer HUD subsidies on top of tax credits to help finance a project and provide deeper affordability. This is clearly true in many of Richmond’s LIHTC projects, with more than half of units receiving Section 8 or other HUD subsidies. As the second figure shows, the share of HUD-subsidized units varies widely among Richmond’s 24 affordable housing developments.
Characteristics of Affordable Housing in Richmond
Geography of Affordable Housing
Affordable housing in Richmond, both projects and tenant-based vouchers, are concentrated in the south-central part of the city, with an additional cluster in the Hilltop area (north of San Pablo). Central Richmond has historically been one of the poorer parts of the city and has been burdened by high unemployment, violence and environmental hazards. The red dots mark the projects (mostly LIHTC, a few project-based Section 8), with the size of the dot indicating the total number of units. The purple base map shows the distribution of HUD-subsidized vouchers (both tenant and project-based) by census tract. Click between layers to show the number of HUD units by tract and the percentage of the rental stock that those units represent. There is some overlap here; as the previous graph showed, many of the LIHTC developments receive HUD subsidies as well.
Source: Rent Program, 2017; HUD, 2015
The second map looks specifically at health indicators, using data from the Centers for Disease Control’s 500 Cities Project. The project includes various indicators but I selected three that I thought might be correlated with housing stressors in some way: asthma, high blood pressure, and mental health. Research has increasingly linked housing quality and stability with both mental and physical health. Richmond in fact has a “Health in All Policies” framework, which targets the toxic stressors at the root of health inequities, including those related to housing. These results do not indicate that poor housing quality or instability are the causes of asthma, high blood pressure or mental health issues, but they could well be a contributing factor.
Source: Rent Program, 2017; CDC, 2017
Characteristics of census tracts with Housing Choice Vouchers
Finally, I plotted several variables against the number of Housing Choice Vouchers (a.k.a. tenant-based Section 8). First, I wanted to see what types of neighborhoods Richmond’s Section 8 tenants ended up in. Researchers have often found that vouchers do not promote a lot of choice or mobility; most low-income voucher-holders of color end up in low-income segregated neighborhoods. I used data from the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC), the agency overseeing LIHTC in the state. TCAC has devised an “opportunity index” for different neighborhoods, as well as a location quotient to measure racial segregation. More information about the committee’s methodology available here.
The first two graphs indicate that census tracts with more Housing Choice Vouchers are likely to be racially-segregated with less opportunity, as defined by TCAC. Both correlations are statistically significant, though the moderate r-values and fan-like distributions (especially for segregation) indicate that voucher concentrations vary significantly among highly-segregated, low-opportunity neighborhoods.
Since one of the motivations for my research project is on the health impact of housing policies, I also graphed the number of vouchers by census tract against several environmental health indicators. Part of TCAC’s holistic opportunity measure is a environmental health index, which looks at various burdens related to traffic, air and water pollution. I plotted diesel particulate matter (PM) and toxic release, two variables within the environmental health index, as well to see if particular factors correlated strongly with Section 8 voucher concentration. All three showed a statistically-significant relationship at the 99% confidence level. However, the correlation coefficient was not particularly high; diesel PM was the highest (0.67), with lower values for toxic release (0.27) and the composite index (-0.54). In all three graphs, there is a fairly wide spread of data points that the best-fit line does not capture very well.
Next steps
As part of my Client Report for the Richmond Rent Program, I will analyze the program’s intake logs, which contain information about landlord and tenant inquiries, complaints and proceedings. I was unable to complete the analysis this semester but I will finish cleaning and analyzing the dataset to join it to the maps. This could serve as a tool for city officials, tenant and public health advocates, as well as landlords and tenants who want a better sense of the big picture.