Made several changes to the Housing Act of 1937, which included providing funding for the rehabilitation of public housing, the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Program and the Hope VI program.
In 1989, Congress established a National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing whose intended goal was to identify the most distressed public housing and come up with a plan to fix the problem. Finding the state of public housing in disrepair, the Commission made several recommendations including increased social services for residents, increased funding for public housing capital needs, better performance assessment for PHAs, and experimentation with new forms of public-private partnerships. Although some reform policies were enacted under the National Affordable Housing Act of 1990, some of the largest reform policies were made under the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 which we will discuss below. 1
The Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 (among other things): 2
Provided funding for the re-rehabilitation of sub-standard public housing.
Created the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Program
created a demonstration program that provided housing vouchers to low-income families with children that could be used to move out of areas with high concentrations of people in poverty to areas with low concentrations of poverty.
Created the Revitalization of Severely Distressed Public Housing program (also known as HOPE VI) which authorized HUD to provide access to grants for PHAs to undertake major redevelopment of distressed public housing.
Also made several other changes which can be found in summary here.
Moving To Opportunity Program: 3
Started as a 10-year research demonstration program that provided voucher rental assistance to families that helped families ry to find housing in low-income neighborhoods.3 The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) enrolled families during the mid-1990s in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Eligible families were ones who already lived in public housing, had children and lived in communities were more than 40% of the population was below the federal poverty line. Those enrolled were put into three groups: a control group, an unrestricted voucher group and a low-poverty voucher group. 4
Results: 4
Low-poverty vouchers led to more families living in low-income neighborhoods.
Children under 13 at the time of move had long-term positive educational and economic outcomes compared to control groups.
Children over 13 had negative long-term outcomes, likely due to the social disruption of moving at an older age.
Adults saw no change in long-term, economic, employment or financial outcomes.
Hope VI: 5
The goal of the program, which stands for Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE), was to improve the living conditions of those living in severally distressed public housing through renovation and reconstitution of public housing complexes, while also reducing the concentration of low-income families in a given complex. De-concentrating poor families was enacted by partnering with other stakeholders such as philanthropic organizations and developers to leverage capital to build mixed-income housing developments. For more on the results of this program, see here.
For more information on public housing and housing vouchers, click here.
For more the full text of the bill, click here.
Endnotes
1. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41654.pdf
2. https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-bill/5334
3. https://www.hud.gov/programdescription/mto
4. https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/evaluating-impact-moving-opportunity-united-states
5. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/411002-A-Decade-of-HOPE-VI.PDF