Last week, I attended Housing Mobility 2026, a two-day conference hosted by Mobility Works in Cleveland. The first day was a training institute for housing mobility staff, especially workers from various local housing authorities around the country. The second day was a gathering of housing mobility practitioners from around Ohio and a presentation about what their work looks like.
I have two main takeaways from the conference. First, many of the people who work at local housing authorities care deeply about the families they serve, but many of them are overloaded. Housing authorities don't always have the time or resources to help each family as much as they would like. Second, many organizations outside of housing authorities are doing important work in the housing space. This work ranges from buying lower-cost market-rate housing to keep it affordable, to helping families find new homes in new neighborhoods and supporting them for several years after they move.
What is housing mobility?
Housing mobility programs help families with Housing Choice Vouchers, often called Section 8, move to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and better schools. This assistance can include help with the housing search, moving costs, landlord outreach, and support after a move. Housing mobility programs often aim to improve outcomes for children, especially safety and education.
A voucher alone often isn’t enough for a family to move to a new neighborhood. Families face several other barriers to moving. Families may not know much about neighborhoods outside of their own, and searching for housing takes time that working parents might not have. Security deposits, application fees, and moving costs add up quickly. Moving to a new neighborhood might also mean leaving behind family, friends, and other support networks, especially if reliable transportation is a concern for families. Additionally, in most of Ohio, landlords may refuse to accept tenants with vouchers, though some Ohio cities have banned such “source of income” housing discrimination. Housing mobility programs try to address these barriers by helping families search for housing, covering upfront costs, and building relationships with landlords.
One study of housing mobility programs looked at the Moving to Opportunity program, an experiment the Department of Housing and Urban Development began in 1994. The program offered families living in high-poverty public housing vouchers and counseling to help them move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. Children whose families moved before they turned 13 were more likely to attend college, and they earned 31%, or $3,500, more per year in their mid-twenties than children whose families did not receive a voucher. As adults, they were also more likely to live in better neighborhoods and less likely to become single parents. Children who were older than 13 when their families moved did not see the same gains, which suggests that how long a child spends in a better-resourced neighborhood matters.
Last year, Scioto Analysis conducted a cost-benefit analysis of a Moving to Opportunity program in Ohio. We modeled an expansion of Families Flourish, a program in Columbus that gives families rental support, relocation help, and life coaching. We estimated a net present value of $149 million, or about $3 in benefits for every $1 in costs. Most of these benefits come from higher lifetime earnings for children, reduced crime, and fewer emergency room visits. Even with a higher 7% discount rate, the program produces $1.70 in benefits for every $1 in costs.
What does housing mobility look like in Ohio?
About one in three Ohio households rent their home, slightly less than at the national level, and Ohio’s median rent is about $1,090 per month. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Ohio has about 422,000 extremely low-income renter households, but there are only 37 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. 73% of these households spend more than 50% of their income each month on housing.
Organizations across Ohio are working on these problems from different angles. The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority is one of the housing authorities in the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Choice Demonstration, a national study testing whether mobility services help voucher families move to higher-opportunity areas. Early results from the Community Choice Demonstration across all sites found that 24% of families offered mobility services moved to an opportunity area within a year, compared to 4% of families who did not receive these services.
In central Ohio, Families Flourish, the program our cost-benefit analysis was based on, gives families three years of rental support along with life coaching to help them move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. The program has served 130 families since it began, and reports that participants' incomes rose by an average of 58%, or $17,000.
Other organizations focus on housing supply. Enterprise Community Partners buys naturally occurring affordable housing, or older rental housing that is affordable without a subsidy, to keep it from becoming unaffordable. In Northeast Ohio, FutureHeights in Cleveland Heights and LakewoodAlive in Lakewood work to keep older homes in good condition. For example, FutureHeights focuses on finding older homes that would otherwise be demolished and improving them to act as affordable housing. LakewoodAlive helps many older homeowners who might otherwise not be able to afford improvements and repairs to their homes.
Housing mobility and housing supply programs approach the same problem from different directions. Mobility programs help individual families move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. These programs are especially useful for voucher holders and for families who lack the time and resources to search for new housing independently. Compared to mobility programs, supply programs work at a larger scale by building, preserving, or repairing affordable homes, often in higher-opportunity neighborhoods. However, supply programs do not change which neighborhoods a family can access, and they don’t necessarily reserve affordable housing for low-income households. Often, housing supply programs are most useful for low- to moderate-income families who can afford rent prices close to the market rate.
Housing mobility could be an overlooked tool for economic mobility in Ohio. Children who move to better-resourced neighborhoods at a young age are more likely to go to college and earn more as adults. Investment in housing mobility could be an area ripe for policymakers looking to improve long-term outcomes for Ohio families.
