Impact of subsidized rental housing characteristics on metropolitan residential satisfaction

Subsidized rental housing construction projects have changed substantially in the last 25 years. Programs such as HOPE VI and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit have resulted in the demolition of large, centralized, publicly owned projects and the construction of small, dispersed, privately managed subsidized housing. A cross-sectional analysis of 43,360 households in the 2005 American Housing Survey (AHS) indicates that subsidized renters report higher satisfaction with their housing unit than do similarly situated nonsubsidized renters. However, public housing residents report significantly lower satisfaction with their neighborhoods, whereas other subsidized residents report significantly higher neighborhood satisfaction. A longitudinal analysis of 488,302 observations from the AHS-Metropolitan samples taken between 1985 and 2004 initially suggests that increasing the proportion of subsidized housing has positive spillover effects on the residential satisfaction of nonsubsidized residents in the metropolitan area. A second analysis suggests that this positive spillover results primarily from the decreased size and age of the subsidized housing structures, rather than from the increased proportion of subsidized housing itself.