Are Public Housing Projects Good for Kids?

One of the goals of federal housing policy is to improve the prospects of children in poor families. But little research has been conducted into the effects of participation in housing programs on children, perhaps because it is difficult to find data sets with information about both participation and interesting outcome measures. This paper combines data from several sources in order to provide a first look at the effect of public housing projects on housing quality and the educational attainment of children. We first use administrative data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to impute the probability that a Census household lives in a public housing project. We find that a higher probability of living in a project is associated with poorer outcomes. We then use two-sample instrumental variables (TSIV) techniques to combine information on the probability of living in a project obtained from the 1990 to 1995 Current Population Surveys, with information on outcomes obtained from 1990 Census. The instrument common to both samples is an indicator equal to one if the household is entitled to a larger housing project unit because of the sex composition of the children