Bureaucratic Inequality: How Administrative Processes and Policy Design Shape Housing Outcomes
type: CreativeWork
description: Income inequality in the U.S. is growing, made unsustainable by the high cost of housing. Of the 35% of the country who rent their homes, the average tenant spends more than 30% of their income on rent (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Government support for this issue is meager, and the programs that exist heavily rely on the private sector (Vale & Freeman, 2019). In fact, governments have largely shifted away from the public provision of welfare programs and towards contracting out. In doing so, public programs are left to the dynamics of market logic. The profit incentive that characterizes the private sector could create perilous externalities for government service recipients. Governments often frame the decision to privatize public services as efficient and rational approaches to the use of public dollars. However, technical rationality can legitimize and mask harmful outcomes (Adams & Balfour, 1998). In this dissertation, I explore how inequality is perpetuated through the hidden mechanisms of the bureaucracy, where contracting out can be seen as an obscure decision. Two empirical chapters explore a hyper-contracted-out program: rental assistance. I first analyzed Source of Income anti-Discrimination (SOI) policies—a policy intended to bolster the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, a kind of low-income rental assistance. Intended to desegregate neighborhoods by providing a wider array of housing to choose from on the private market, the HCV program faces limitation in its success, including the willingness of landlords to accept a tenant’s voucher. Using a large-n dataset of urban neighborhoods, I find that SOI policies only modestly bolster the HCV program’s success. SOI policies are associated with only slight decreases in poverty concentration. However, I find that policies designed with administrative enforcement mechanisms are more effective than those with court enforcement mechanisms. In considering ways to support the HCV program, I turn to …
abstract: Income inequality in the U.S. is growing, made unsustainable by the high cost of housing. Of the 35% of the country who rent their homes, the average tenant spends more than 30% of their income on rent (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Government support for this issue is meager, and the programs that exist heavily rely on the private sector (Vale & Freeman, 2019). In fact, governments have largely shifted away from the public provision of welfare programs and towards contracting out. In doing so, public programs are left to the dynamics of market logic. The profit incentive that characterizes the private sector could create perilous externalities for government service recipients. Governments often frame the decision to privatize public services as efficient and rational approaches to the use of public dollars. However, technical rationality can legitimize and mask harmful outcomes (Adams & Balfour, 1998). In this dissertation, I explore how inequality is perpetuated through the hidden mechanisms of the bureaucracy, where contracting out can be seen as an obscure decision. Two empirical chapters explore a hyper-contracted-out program: rental assistance. I first analyzed Source of Income anti-Discrimination (SOI) policies—a policy intended to bolster the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, a kind of low-income rental assistance. Intended to desegregate neighborhoods by providing a wider array of housing to choose from on the private market, the HCV program faces limitation in its success, including the willingness of landlords to accept a tenant’s voucher. Using a large-n dataset of urban neighborhoods, I find that SOI policies only modestly bolster the HCV program’s success. SOI policies are associated with only slight decreases in poverty concentration. However, I find that policies designed with administrative enforcement mechanisms are more effective than those with court enforcement mechanisms. In considering ways to support the HCV program, I turn to …
author: Broughton, K. Noelle
language: en
keywords: housing policy, social equity
date published: 2026-05-31
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:44:44Z
provider: University of Kansas
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Kansas

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/1808/39517