Amid the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) recent emphasis on policies that increase employment among assisted renters, understanding housing-based self-sufficiency programs is more important than ever. Although proposals to increase work through requirements and minimum rent increases have attracted attention, HUD already offers programs through which housing authorities and private owners can encourage and support residents in making economic progress. Through a periodic series, How Housing Matters will clarify the evidence to date on economic mobility programs at HUD.
For the second post in this series, we asked James Riccio and Nandita Verma, director and senior associate, respectively, at the research organization MDRC, about the evidence behind the Jobs Plus program, which connects public housing residents with employment, education, and financial empowerment to help them find and keep better-paying jobs.
Jobs Plus started as a HUD demonstration in six cities between 1998 and 2003. The program took an existing public housing development and added three forms of work supports for everyone residing there. Following the demonstration, a few locations replicated the approach with some modifications. (A study examining the effects of New York City’s replication of Jobs Plus is under way, but its results are not yet public.) By 2015, evidence from the initial demonstration led HUD to fund a new Jobs Plus pilot and later commission new studies on the expansion effort, including one that documents implementation lessons from the first nine expansion sites.
[For more on this story, go to https://howhousingmatters.org/...s-program-expert-qa/]
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