HUD State Data: 3 Out of 4 HUD Assisted Renter Households are Headed by Women.

A prior post HERE included national only data and pointed out that reductions in HUD rental assistance would have an disproportionately adverse impact on women, who represent 3 out of 4 HUD assisted renter households. 

HUD has made 2009 PUMS sample state level demographic data for HUD assisted  renter households available at the website HERE. This sample data includes Public Housing programs (including vouchers) as well as HUD Multifamily project based assistance. It does not include HUD CDBG, HOME, or homeless program funded rental assistance.  

To see more background about the data and a listing of ALL of the fields available, including income and household type fields, open the MS Word data dictionaries for public housing and multifamily.

Using the PUMS data I constructed the Excel workbook HERE that summarizes by state the percentage of HUD assisted renter households headed by women. This is the ONLY breakout I have ever seen of HUD assisted renter heads of households, by gender, and by state.

The Excel file opens with a worksheet I constructed showing a table of the female HH % by state, and if you scroll to the right you will see a horizontal bar graph with all state female HH %'s. (Graph is pasted below as an image). 

Note that Oregon's female headed HUD rental assistance percentage is 76%, while many southern states have HUD female head of household percentages of 85%+

The workbook includes a worksheet that combines both HUD public housing and multifamily PUMS data for ALL states (I added a column that substitutes names for codes showing the type of family in the "H6" field and a column showing whether the program field is for public housing or multifamily). 

The workbook also contains a pivot table worksheet that uses the data worksheet; this pivot table will allow users to look at other dimensions beyond the gender of head of household that is the focus of this post. 

Both the national data and state level PUMS data demonstrate that reductions in HUD rental assistance would CLEARLY have a disproportionate impact on female headed households. 

Talk about eliminating HUD may be mere campaign rhetoric, but future reductions in HUD rental assistance will also be seen by some as part of the politically charged "War on Women".

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.