Terms and Sources
This report is based on data from the 1997 American Housing Survey, which incorporated several procedural changes to improve the accuracy and reliability of the data. Although the basic content of the questionnaire and the sample of housing units survey both remain essentially the same as in earlier years, methods of interviewing respondents and processing data were changed. Moreover, as detailed below, the AHS questions asked to identify households participating in rental assistance programs were extensively changed in order to improve the quality of AHS data on assisted households, thus making the definition of worst case needs in 1997 not directly comparable with the definition and estimates from earlier years given in previous reports to Congress.2
In assessing changes over time, it is important to use a consistent definition of worst case needs. The definition of "worst case needs" used in past reports was based on (1) the income limits included in Federal housing statutes for "very-low-income families" and housing conditions defined as (2) "priority housing problems" (see Appendix B, Glossary). Because the worst case needs classification represented those receiving preference for admission to Federal rental assistance programs, families already assisted by Federal programs were excluded from the count.
As detailed in Exhibit 1, however, the revised 1997 AHS questions on participation in assistance programs do not distinguish State or local rental assistance programs from Federal programs. Therefore, in this report, families who have "worst case needs" are defined as those who:
- Are renters;
- Do not receive housing assistance from Federal, State, or local government programs;
- Have incomes below 50 percent of their local area median family income, as determined by HUD; and
- Pay more than one-half of their income for rent and utilities or live in severely substandard housing.3
In the years between decennial housing censuses, the basic source of information for analyzing the U.S. housing stock and the housing needs of U.S. households is the AHS. The AHS is conducted for HUD by the Census Bureau, which completes some 45,000 interviews with householders in a national sample of housing units every 2 years. Smaller samples in 47 large metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) are surveyed on a 4- to 6-year cycle.
HUD's first formal report to Congress on worst case needs, submitted in 1991, was based on the national AHS taken in 1989. The second report, in 1992, augmented 1989 AHS data for the Nation with information on worst case needs from the metropolitan surveys. In 1994, HUD based its report on data from the 1991 national AHS and the 1990 Decennial Census.
The 1996 report was based on data from the 1993 AHS and, for the first time, included administrative data on the characteristics of households participating in the public housing and Section 8 programs. The 1996 report also included analyses of data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) to better understand the housing needs of persons with disabilities and their participation in HUD programs. Finally, that report reanalyzed and refined earlier AHS data to more reliably track growth in the number of households with worst case housing needs between 1978 and 1993 and to examine changes in the supplies of housing affordable to extremely-low-income and very-low-income renters.
The 1998 report used data from the 1995 AHS and HUD administrative data as of January 1997 to examine worst case needs and changes in supplies of affordable housing.
2 HUD's previous reports to Congress are: Priority Problems and "Worst Case" Needs in 1989 (June 1991, HUD-1314-PDR), The Location of Worst Case Needs in the Late 1980s (December 1992, HUD-1387-PDR), Worst Case Needs for Housing Assistance in the United States in 1990 and 1991 (June 1994, HUD-1481-PDR), Rental Housing Assistance at a Crossroads: A Report to Congress on Worst Case Housing Needs (March 1996), and Rental Housing Assistance-The Crisis Continues (April 1998). The 1994, 1996, and 1998 reports are available online at http://www.huduser.org under the Publications heading.
3 Although the homeless have "substandard" housing by definition and thus worst case needs, they are excluded from AHS estimates of worst case needs because the AHS surveys and counts only persons in housing units. Because of this, AHS estimates undercount the "true" number of households meeting the "worst case" definition. Conversely, the AHS may overestimate the number of housed households that have worst case problems because income is underreported by some 15 percent by AHS respondents. This income underreporting may inflate AHS counts of households with incomes below 50 percent of area median that pay more than half of their income for rent. As Chapter 2 discusses, we can estimate the effect of income underreporting on worst case estimates, but not the effect of omitting the homeless.
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