Focus on Critical Rental Housing Policy Experiments: Framing the Discussion for February 13th

W08-5: A principal finding from the Revisiting Rental Housing Symposium convened by the Joint Center for Housing Studies in November 2006 is that a great deal has been learned from recent experiments and demonstrations about how to use rental housing assistance to encourage improved labor, mental health, educational, and other social and economic outcomes. A related finding is that much more could be done to fine tune rental housing policy and make a more compelling case for its value if the government built on the promise of some recent controlled policy experiments and funded more such experiments. Although a handful of carefully designed controlled experiments point the way forward, many of the findings from previous demonstration programs are still contested because the evaluations of them were not systematic enough to produce irrefutable conclusions about whether interventions worked and if so which specific interventions led to positive outcomes…