Assessing the impact of a local housing intervention program

Little reported research exists on the assessment of net impact of the large variety of housing intervention programs which have proliferated in the last twenty years. This paper evaluates one such program, which constructs new housing in inner-city neighborhoods of a Midwestern city, using a quasi-experimental a-posteriori design. Data were collected by survey technique from four types of homeowners, three of which served as constructed control groups for the program treatment. Regression analyses indicate that the program had an effect upon neighborhood satisfaction and satisfaction with the home, but no effect upon desire to move or spending for remodelling. Since the design was weak on internal validity, a number of threats to the validity of the results are systematically tested and, for the most part, rejected. The results are also found to be comparable in direction to those of a national evaluation of the Urban Homestead Demonstration Program.