Decision Support for Family Relocation Decisions under the Section 8 Housing Assistance Program Using Geographic Information Systems and the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Recent evidence suggests that often families seeking housing under the Section 8 program are unable to choose potential destination neighborhoods that maximize their likelihood of successfully exercising housing subsidies and securing beneficial family outcomes. Housing mobility programs such as the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program and the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Program, which rely on intensive counseling and small cohorts of relocatees, produce beneficial outcomes, however. How could the standard Section 8 program be improved to enable participants to make better location choices? This article presents a prototype geographic information systems–based decision support system intended to allow individual Section 8 participants, with the assistance of housing authority counselors, to identify potential destination communities that best match their preferences. Users identify attributes of potential destination communities, identify potential destination communities that satisfy certain criteria based on these attributes, rank the attributes according to their individual preferences, and, finally, rank the most-desired destination communities. An example is given using data from metropolitan Pittsburgh.