Can reminders help people plan to move?

Background

Housing vouchers are a powerful way to transition families out of high poverty, high crime neighborhoods, particularly compared to traditional public housing approaches. However, even the landmark 1994 “Moving to Opportunity” study found that positive effects of vouchers — including better physical and mental health — only accrued to recipients who actually used their voucher to move.

We partnered with the St. Louis Housing Authority (SLHA) to help housing voucher recipients make the most of their desire to move. A baseline analysis of SLHA data indicated that only around 41% of recipients who stated an intention to move two months before their leases expired actually successfully moved on time. The remainder either did not move or moved more than 7 days after their leases expired, often at a great financial cost. Our goal was to help voucher recipients who expressed the intention to move to do so on time and to a lower poverty area.

Key Insights

To better understand the barriers facing housing voucher recipients, we interviewed voucher recipients and housing authority staff. We also reviewed case files for a randomly drawn sample of 367 voucher recipients to understand rates of missed appointments and estimate the move rate.

We found that:

• Voucher recipients are really only prompted to start thinking of moving during their recertification appointment, which occurs around 2-3 months (60 - 90 days) before their current lease end date. While that may sound like a lot of time, 81 days was actually the median amount of time most successful movers needed to find a home and complete housing authority paperwork.

• Voucher recipients face many costs when trying to move, including paying application fees, security deposits, and paying for moving services. Especially given the tight two-month timeline, many families lean on family, friends, or debt to overcome these financial challenges.

• Voucher recipients who had tried to move either successfully or unsuccessfully in the past were the most likely to successfully move in the future. These recipients deeply understood the idiosyncrasies of moving with a voucher in a way first time movers likely did not.

• Only about 50% of those that did successfully move to areas with 5-10% lower poverty rates. Many were unaware that their voucher would be worth more — meaning they could move to a more expensive home — in lower poverty areas of St. Louis.

We hypothesized that creating a two-month-long text message program to give recipients weekly reminders of what they must do that week to successfully move on time would both remind recipients to start working on their move early and give them much needed insight into the housing authority’s process.

Experiment

To test our hypothesis, we identified all housing voucher recipients who stated that they planned to move at their recertification appointment during a four-month period. We then randomly assigned half of these recipients to get our two-month-long series of moving tips via text. The other half got no communication.

Results

The experiment launched in December 2018 and ran for about four months with 426 voucher recipients. We found that, overall, the text message program did not have a significant effect on helping people to move.

Interestingly, the analysis indicates that the text message program may have helped to reduce the days between a voucher recipient’s lease end date and the actual move date. This suggests that while the text messages likely were insufficient in helping people to move, they may have had a complementary effect for those who were going to move anyways