CAREER: Efficient and Equitable Housing Allocation

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will contribute to the advancement of national prosperity and economic welfare by supporting research to study techniques to allocate affordable housing equitably and efficiently. It addresses ongoing challenges of homelessness and housing affordability with innovative policies to (i) increase housing voucher utilization and ensure that more high-barrier households benefit from housing vouchers, (ii) increase the rate at which voucher waiting lists move while reducing administrative overhead, (iii) reduce the number of households that return to homelessness after receiving rapid rehousing support, and (iv) ensure that the allocation of new rental units offers opportunities to a diverse set of applicants. The education and outreach plan includes collaboration with practitioners, dissemination of ideas through a blog and YouTube channel, and publicly sharing innovative materials and activities from a new course. Achieving these research goals will require overcoming two research hurdles. The first is that housing assistance programs often have multiple objectives that differ from widely considered goals such as revenue or throughput maximization. The second is that many policies have long-run consequences which run counter to their short-term effects. This project will develop dynamic models to capture the effects of current decisions on the future evolution of the system, formulate suitable objectives, and recommend and analyze novel policies to achieve these objectives. The project will extend concepts from inventory management, dynamic matching, queueing, and optimization by considering dynamic matching problems in which current decisions influence future arrivals, and inventory management problems with stochastic lead time from unknown distributions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.