Introduction and Overview: An Update of Sections I and II of the General Design Report. Housing Assistance Supply Experiment

摘要

The general background and purpose statement of the Housing Assistance Supply Experiment (designed to test the market and community response to a full scale housing allowance program and to measure mobility patterns of recipient families) and the organization of the 'General Design Report' is given, and specific policy questions to which the experiment is addressed and strategy used in seeking empirical answers to these questions are covered. Policy questions regard such issues as: the effectiveness of the program as a means of inducing housing improvements and the related possibilities for inflation in housing prices; the behavior of market intermediaries and others in an allowance - stimulated market; residential mobility induced by the program and the consequent redistribution of local populations. Also explained is the proposed monitoring program for the supply experiment which relies partly on administrative records of the allowance program, but principally on six annual cycles of field surveys addressed to a large sample of residential properties, their owners, and their occupants. The final section evaluates the probable success of the Supply Experiment regarding the reliability and credibility of evidence concerning the effects of a national housing allowance program. Appendices include a mathematical model of housing deterioriation under alternative maintenance policies, a detailed specification of the account system for measuring supply response, a method for estimating parameters of the production function for housing services and for measuring changes in the prices of factors used in production of housing services, and a technique for combining data from the demand and supply experiments.