REAGAN’S AUSTERITY BUREAUCRATS

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration initiated a dramatic policy shift towards a new housing voucher program, which simultaneously resulted in a near-halt in public and project-based assisted housing funding. When analyzing this historic policy shift, many affordable housing scholars have overemphasized race-absent narratives about fiscal austerity to explain the Reagan administration’s policy rejection of public housing and embrace of housing vouchers. To present a more comprehensive and intersectional history of the Reagan administration’s transition to housing vouchers, I employ an alternative methodological lens that I call Black feminist critical policy studies. This paper traces how the Office of Management and Budget and Housing and Urban Development officials relied on obscured racial and gender bias in their debate informing Reagan's alternative housing voucher program. By revealing the social bias endemic in the Reagan administration’s housing debate, this article illustrates that housing vouchers were not simply a neutral, cost-efficient policy tool but helped ensure low-income black mothers’ continued subjection to anti-welfare backlash, housing discrimination, and paternal supervision.

Moving to Improve?: A Qualitative Meta-analysis of Neighborhood Violence and Residential Decision-making among Housing Voucher Holders

Many people poised to move through housing choice voucher programs cite violence as a primary factor in their decision-making. This study synthesizes a body of qualitative data to explore how participants recount their experiences with neighborhood violence and analyzes its relationship to residential decision-making. We find that while participants expressed a desire to move to improve their circumstances, they also recounted how neighborhood violence constrained choice by influencing a multitude of factors in the decision-making process. This shows the stress neighborhood violence places on households and how neighborhood factors constrain housing choice.