How to attract more landlords to the housing choice voucher program: a case study of landlord outreach efforts David P. Varady a *, Joseph Jaroscak b and Reinout Kleinhans c a School of Planning, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA; b Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness, Arlington, VA, USA; c Architecture and the Built Environment, Department OTB, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands Since 1980, the focus of American housing policy has shifted away from project-based to tenant-based subsidies, i.e. the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP). Yet many HCVP recipients have remained in high-poverty and high-minority areas of central cities. To improve the effectiveness of HCVP in expanding residential choices, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is encouraging local public housing authorities to utilize a variety of techniques to provide more opportu- nity for voucher recipients to move to low poverty areas including meetings with current or prospective owners, owners’ newsletters, owner fairs, program videos and direct contact with owners. Although there has been a considerable body of research on voucher recipients in the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity programs, two special housing voucher programs, there has been little research on the effectiveness of landlord outreach efforts as part of the regular HCVP. We therefore conducted a case study of landlord outreach efforts currently being implemented by the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. We combined observation of landlord outreach events with semi-structured interviews to determine reasons why landlords do or do not participate, landlords’ perceptions on the extent to which HCVP addresses their concerns, what they take away from these events, and how outreach efforts might be improved. This case study indicates that there is considerable room for improvement in landlord outreach efforts by the housing authority. The policy implications for HUD as well as public housing authorities across the United States are discussed. Keywords: landlords; housing vouchers; poverty deconcentration Introduction The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has made significant changes in the way it funds and makes affordable housing available. Since around 1980, the federal government’ s focus has shifted from subsidizing private new or rehabilitated developments to providing subsidies to low-income renters in the private sector. Section 8 certificates and vouchers evolved into the current Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP, Schwartz 2015). Voucher holders pay 30% of their income on rents and the voucher program covers the difference, and in some cases such as unemployment, the voucher makes up all or nearly all of the individual’ s rental cost. The HCVP has two goals: to expand access to decent, affordable housing and to provide lower-income renters with the opportunity to move to ‘better’ low-poverty neighborhoods; in other words, to enable poverty deconcentration (Varady 2011). *Corresponding author. Email: David.Varady@uc.edu Urban Research & Practice, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2016.1175741 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Downloaded by [david varady] at 07:22 19 April 2016