Targeting In-Kind Transfers through Market Design: A Revealed Preference Analysis of Public Housing Allocation

Public housing benefits are rationed through wait lists. Theoretical work on public housing allocation has debated how much choice applicants should have over units, identifying a possible trade-off between efficiency and redistribution. This paper empirically establishes the existence and economic importance of this trade-off using wait list data from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I estimate a model of public housing preferences in a setting where heterogeneous apartments are rationed through waiting time. Eliminating choice would improve targeting but reduce tenant welfare by more than 30 percent. Such a change is only justified on targeting grounds by a strong social preference for redistribution. (JEL D47, H75, I38, R38)

School Choice with Flexible Diversity Goals and Specialized Seats

We present a new and rich model of school choice with flexible diversity goals and specialized seats. The model also applies to other settings such as public housing allocation with diversity objectives. Our method of expressing flexible diversity goals is also applicable to other settings in moral multi-agent decision making where competing policies need to be balanced when allocating scarce resources. For our matching model, we present a polynomial-time algorithm that satisfies desirable properties, including strategyproofness and stability under several natural subdomains of our problem. We complement the results by providing a clear understanding about what results do not extend when considering the general model.

Public Housing Allocation Model in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area under Clustering Algorithm

In the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Bay Area), the allocation methods of public rental housing are analyzed to achieve scientific and fair housing allocation as much as possible, so as to protect the housing demand of low-income and middle-income families. The housing model in the Bay Area is analyzed firstly, and the key points of public rental housing and allocation management models are discussed comprehensively. Furthermore, a method based on rough-based fuzzy clustering (RFC) is proposed to analyze the housing demands of security groups, and a public housing allocation model is constructed based on actual demand of residents. The housing allocation plan is given and decided by the decision-making department based on the demand of the security objects and the characteristics of public housing. The simulation experiments are performed on the clustering algorithm optimized based on rough set feature selection. On the Chess data set, the optimized clustering algorithm shows an obvious improvement in clustering accuracy and recall rate compared with the traditional clustering algorithms, which are 0.76 and 0.95, respectively. The bilateral matching method based on fuzzy axiom design can fully consider the actual needs of both the supply and demand of the housing security, which is beneficial to improve the rationality and correctness of public housing allocation. The allocation method of public housing based on demand clustering analysis focuses on improving the housing security level and strives to meet the higher-level housing improvement needs of housing security objects, so as to provide security objects with more expected living conditions and improve housing allocation effect.

From RHAM to RHNA and Beyond

The State of California’s main tool for housing planning is legislation mandating a “Housing Element” as a component of all cities’ and counties’ comprehensive plans. Each local jurisdiction must demonstrate how it can meet the state’s calculated “Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). The article traces the roots of this state requirement from an earlier Regional Housing Allocation Model (RHAM), which was merely a guideline. To ensure compliance, the legislature barred courts from intervening in the RHNA process. Nevertheless, it has taken four decades for California’s local jurisdictions to adopt legally adequate Housing Elements.

Design of Lotteries and Wait-Lists for Affordable Housing Allocation

We study a setting in which dynamically arriving items are assigned to waiting agents, who have heterogeneous values for distinct items and heterogeneous outside options. An ideal match would both target items to agents with the worst outside options and match them to items for which they have high value. Our first finding is that two common approaches—using independent lotteries for each item and using a waitlist in which agents lose priority when they reject an offer—lead to identical outcomes in equilibrium. Both approaches encourage agents to accept items that are marginal fits. We show that the quality of the match can be improved by using a common lottery for all items. If participation costs are negligible, a common lottery is equivalent to several other mechanisms, such as limiting participants to a single lottery, using a waitlist in which offers can be rejected without punishment, or using artificial currency. However, when there are many agents with low need, there is an unavoidable trade-off between matching and targeting. In this case, utilitarian welfare may be maximized by focusing on good matching (if the outside option distribution is light tailed) or good targeting (if it is heavy tailed). Using a common lottery achieves near-optimal matching, whereas introducing participation costs achieves near-optimal targeting. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

Divisive social policy: the competition for physical and symbolic resources

In this chapter, the focus turns to explore how the policy impacted on participants’ perceptions of fairness and justice in social housing allocation. This is set within the context of existing debates about the racialisation of social housing, a result of struggles over who should have preference to access this declining resource. While those tensions are played out at the local level, the rhetoric around social housing has increasingly linked this form of tenure with ‘welfare dependency’. The chapter begins by exploring how participants evaluate austerity politics in terms of their own economic position. It then turns to focus on their status and social positioning and how the policy raises questions of worth and value. What we see here are not just struggles over material resources such as housing, but also over less tangible psychosocial and symbolic resources that afford people a sense of worth and value.