The Center on Poverty and Social Policy hosted Eva Rosen for a poverty and social policy seminar to discuss her book The Voucher Promise, in which she examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program through the lives of families living in the Baltimore neighborhood of Park Heights.
Do vouchers serve as a vehicle for social mobility and increase affordable housing options? Do they help fight concentrated poverty and segregation? Rosen tells the stories of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. She finds that while vouchers are a powerful and promising tool, housing policy can replicate the very inequalities it has the power to solve.
While housing vouchers are a cornerstone of US federal housing policy and helps millions of families afford housing, the program also has years-long waiting lists and only one-quarter of those who qualify for the housing help actually receive it. Recently, the Biden administration has proposed a bold policy to take America’s biggest rental assistance program—Section 8 housing vouchers—and make it available to every family who qualifies. What will this mean for struggling families? Can this help fix the nation’s housing crisis?
Eva Rosen is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Rosen studies housing policy and is interested in social inequality, urban sociology, poverty and inequality, race and ethnicity, ethnography, social policy, immigration, crime, and culture. Her book, The Voucher Promise, about urban inequality and housing vouchers was published by Princeton University Press in July 2020.
Dr. Rosen has published in the American Sociological Review, City & Community, Social Problems, Housing Policy Debate, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and The Annual Review of Law and Social Science. She is a member of the Scholar Strategy Network. Also featured in The New York Times: Opinion | If ‘Housing Is a Right,’ How Do We Make It Happen?
Published “Racial Discrimination in Housing: How Landlords Use Algorithms and Home Visits to Screen Tenants”
Rosen received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Social Policy.