Alvaro Cortes
Ken Lam
David Fein

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In 1998, public housing agencies (PHAs) were given considerable discretion to select tenants on the basis of local PHA preferences rather than on old federal preferences for households experiencing housing-related hardships. Many PHAs have adopted other categorical preferences. As a result, the demographic profile and household composition of public housing tenants have changed. These changes have important implications for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP), because past research has found that household characteristics and location factors significantly affect a household’s length of stay in the program. The study described in this article uses administrative data to explore the factors associated with a household’s length of stay in the HCVP. The study focuses on the degree to which the presence of children of varying ages affects a household’s length of stay in the program and the degree to which older children, as a potential source of childcare, may mitigate a longer duration of housing assistance. The study also explores the degree to which the disability status of the household head or children affects a household’s length of stay in the program. The study’s main finding is that the presence of an infant or a toddler increases a household’s length of stay in the HCVP, after controlling for an array of household and location characteristics, but the presence of other children in the same household attenuates this effect. Conversely, the study finds that the presence of teenagers, especially male teenagers, magnifies this effect.