Subsidized Housing and Household Structure

Yana Kucheva, University of California, Los Angeles

One of the explicit goals of US welfare policy has been to keep families together and discourage nonmarital childbearing (Berrick 2006). While participation in AFDC has had a modest effect on divorce and separation and almost no effect on unmarried fertility, the program’s most pronounced influence may have been on the living arrangements of unmarried mothers by encouraging their independent residence away from kin (Ruggles 1997). This paper will examine a related but often overlooked part of the relationship between government subsidies and household composition, namely how the availability and receipt of subsidized housing affects household composition.