Vouchers Welcome? Three Essays Exploring Landlords’ Views on Housing Vouchers

The Housing Choice Voucher Program (“HCVP”) is one of the largest housing subsidy programs targeting low-income households. Despite its history and scale of the program, however, the impact of the HCVP is still unsatisfactory. One of the reasons is landlord discrimination against housing vouchers that prevents voucher families from moving to ‘opportunity neighborhoods’. Although landlord participation in the HCVP is instrumental in achieving the program’s policy goals, as the vouchers’ high demand for rental housing units in ‘opportunity neighborhoods’ cannot be met without it, little systematic discussion has taken place regarding landlords’ perception and strategies for housing vouchers. Based on idiosyncratic text data scraped from five U.S. landlords’ forums, three essays in this dissertation answer questions of housing vouchers, discrimination, and landlords. The first essay identifies the topics that are discussed among landlords regarding housing vouchers and voucher tenants. The second essay examines landlords’ emotions regarding the HCVP and voucher households and analyzes the factors that contribute to their perceptions. The third essay delves into landlords’ strategies toward tenants with housing vouchers and analyzes how their reactions may vary depending on contexts such as the existence of Source of Income protections in state and local jurisdictions. Findings from the three essays provide theoretical and practical implications on landlords and housing vouchers, and the analytic strategies employed in this dissertation expand the scope of methodological approaches that could be used in social science and policy research.