Piloting housing programs
When creating new housing programs, when is piloting appropriate?
Some experiments work …
And some don’t …
What types of pilots work best?
Fearless ones!
Oliver Faltin-Traeger, graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has produced an illuminating and provocative paper (full disclosure: prepared under my supervision), Housing Policy Innovation Through Effective Experimentation (link in .pdf) that’s chock-full of intriguing postulates such as these:
I. When is piloting appropriate? Experimentation is appropriate in general under the following conditions:
1. Goals are clear, strategies are not.
2. Multiple goals are desirable, but their interactive achievability is opaque.
3. Useful information will be provided.
4. The pilot will offer broad applicability.
5. No easy alternative exists.
6. Irreversible impacts are considered.
In particular, every experimental approach faces tradeoffs in terms of the challenges it must confront operationally versus its potential to benefit society. A more top-down approach is likely to be fruitful under the following conditions:
Experimenting means flying upside down …
Oliver arrives at his theses (there are thirty of them) by examining five different case-studies drawn from the last thirty years of American affordable housing policy and programs:
1. Section 8 and the Experimental Housing Allowance Program
2. Mark-to-Market Demonstration Program
3. Urban Development Action Grants
4. Low-Income Housing Tax Credits
5. Nehemiah Homes Program
In themselves, the cases represent interesting windows into the past; together, they comprise an extensive body of evidence.
Read the whole thing.
Pour le Merite …
