Public Housing Authorities Under Devolution

Problem: Local public housing authorities (PHAs) in the United States face a different set of mandates and opportunities today than they did before 1980; PHA financing and program authority are more flexible, while federal funding has shrunk, and new obligations have arisen. Taken together, these changes in federal policy have so diversified PHAsʹ responsibilities that they risk organizational incoherence and ineffectiveness in trying to fulfill all their obligations. Purpose: To understand the future prospects for public and assisted housing in the United States, we trace the influence of the last two decades of federal policy on the obligations and discretion of public housing authorities. Methods: We coded the federal policy actions that have affected affordable housing policy since 1980 to identify their likely implications for PHAsʹ organizational strategies. Our coding distinguished initiatives likely to prompt strategic innovation by PHAs from those likely to prompt a reactive posture or defense of existing arrangements. Results and conclusions: In combination, the most prominent and binding federal initiatives push PHAs toward reactive and defensive organizational strategies. More federal initiatives foster changes in PHAsʹ services, revenues, and internal capacities than in their markets and external partnerships. The federal initiatives with the most dramatic and far-reaching impacts on PHAsʹ strategies are the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, voucher expansion, voucher funding formulas, and cuts in public housing funding. By comparison, other federal initiatives have had a more limited and diffuse impact on PHAsʹ statefies. Takeaway for practice: Reports from individual cities suggest that PHAs have responded to these federal policy changes by choosing to focus their organizational strategies on achieving specific aims for narrow subpopulations. These choices about organizational strategy matter because federal housing policy outcomes now depend both on what PHAs choose to do and on what they are capable of doing. PHAs that strive for organizational coherence may choose both to diversify funding streams and to serve fewer poor clients, while those attempting to fulfill all their federal policy obligations risk excelling at none. In the future, PHAs struggling to survive may reduce services to the poorest households to an even greater extent than federal policy now dictates.