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Abstract:
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Access to affordable housing is the object of many Federal programs, and housing costs are an important component of the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure. The American Community Survey (ACS) includes an item on monthly rent. Responses to this item have been a matter of some confusion. Two concepts are relevant: 1) the Contract Rent that the unit rents for; and 2) the Total Tenant Payment, or the household's monthly outlay on rent. The ACS instructions on the Rent item differ by mode of interview. Administrative datasets from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) include contract rent and total tenant payment for households supported by the agency's programs. In a special dataset, the records for these households have been linked to the 2012 and 2013 ACS Household sample in order to assess which monthly rent concept the responses to the ACS rent item best correspond to. The present analysis explores this question, examining effects by mode of interview, program type, and household characteristics. The analysis employs the R Survey package (Lumley, 2015), which accommodates the replicate weights used for variance estimation from the ACS.
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