Porting to Opportunity: An Analysis of Portability in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been interested in improving the housing choice and outcomes of housing choice voucher (HCV) tenants, with a focus on getting tenants into neighborhoods of higher opportunity. The HCV program is HUD's largest rental assistance program, serving more than 2 million families annually across the United States. Tenants are not confined to living within the jurisdiction of their public housing agency (PHA) and can move anywhere in the country through a process called porting. Little is known about the characteristics and neighborhood outcomes of portability moves. This article tracks porting moves using HUD's internal administrative data and finds that 9.9 percent of HCV tenants will port, one-third of portability moves are greater than 250 miles, and 63 percent of porting moves are to different metropolitan areas. By matching tenant moves with tract-level data from the 2015-2019 American Community Survey (ACS) data, this article identifies changes in neighborhood characteristics for porting households. Porting, on average, results in a move to a neighborhood of higher opportunity as measured through education rates, income inequality, median household income, and poverty rates. Even when compared with HCV families that move but remain within their PHA's jurisdiction, porting moves tend to be to neighborhoods of higher opportunity.