Boston's Experiment With Rent Subsidies

Abstract Within the last few years several new housing programs for low-income families have been authorized by Congress. Before these low-income housing programs came into existence, an experimental rent subsidy program in Boston anticipated many of their features and characteristics. From 1964 to 1967, forty large, low-income families, who had been displaced by public action, paid the rents they normally would have paid in public housing for lodging in three newly constructed nonprofit developments built mainly for middle income families. Evaluation showed that the experimental rent subsidy program met its objective-providing sound, attractive housing to low-income families without major difficulties and at moderate cost. Such rent subsidy programs have important implications for certain persistent problems of housing policy-relocation, desegregation, economic integration, and code enforcement.