The Housing Lottery - by Brian J McCabe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of our rental assistance programs, including the Housing Choice Voucher program.

It's no secret that the United States is experiencing a housing crisis. While the cost of rental housing has soared since 2000, the median household income has barely changed. The Housing Choice Voucher program is America's largest rental assistance program, but most households that are eligible for assistance simply cannot get access to it. Without enough resources to serve every eligible household in their communities, public housing agencies keep waiting lists, run lotteries, and claw back vouchers from households that are unable to meet the demands of the housing market. Despite the enormous benefits that come from affordable housing, it's simply out of reach for most renters in need.

In The Housing Lottery, sociologist Brian J. McCabe takes readers to the frontlines of these housing agencies to understand how scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of the program. Following the bureaucrats charged with making these decisions about allocating housing resources, McCabe shows how decisions and regulations resulting from scarcity have enormous consequences. He presents extensive evidence about the importance of rental assistance for lifting households out of poverty and creating economic opportunity. To improve housing assistance as a public resource and to combat housing insecurity and its negative effects, McCabe argues for a more inclusive, expansive approach to federal housing policy.

Review Quotes

Both a window into the daily work of housing agencies and a critique of federal policy design, The Housing Lottery reveals how scarcity shapes rental housing assistance in the United States. Brian McCabe draws on the experiences of those implementing housing programs to show how waiting lists, lotteries, and administrative practices shape who gains access to a Housing Choice Voucher. The result is a nuanced and deeply human account of how policy design translates into lived inequality, offering critical insights into what it would take to build a more equitable housing system.

--Carolina Reid, University of California, Berkeley

The Housing Lottery poses an uncomfortable question for readers across the political spectrum: why does the richest country in the world have so many people who struggle to keep a roof over their heads? Brian McCabe makes a compelling case that the U.S. needs a fundamentally different approach to housing subsidies: not just more money, but programs that are simpler to administer and more transparent. This book should provoke constructive arguments about the appropriate role of governments and markets among researchers and policy wonks of all stripes.

--Jenny Schuetz, author of 'Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing Systems'

"Few have McCabe's expertise in housing research, practice, and policy, and it shows. McCabe's innovation is a deep dive into the policy staff who must broker and ration our scarce housing resources. All scholars--even those already studying housing policy--stand to learn new insights not just from the original empirical work but from McCabe's richly realized and definitive history of how America tries and falls short of housing its poor. His unflinching and incisive analysis of policy solutions is a must-read for anyone who hopes to stitch together this gaping hole in our safety net."
--Stefanie DeLuca, Johns Hopkins University

"In The Housing Lottery, Brian McCabe draws back the veil on our overburdened housing assistance program. By applying a clear sociological lens, McCabe highlights the ways in which profound scarcity of resources shapes nearly every aspect of the program and produces incredibly complex institutional structures that are almost unnavigable for the tiny fraction of the families lucky enough to receive housing assistance. This book is crucial reading for those interested in the organizational and human costs of our collective failure to adequately fund housing in America."

--Kyle Crowder, University of Washington

About the Author

Brian J. McCabe is professor of sociology at Georgetown University. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership, the coauthor of Democracy Vouchers and the Promise of Fairer Elections in Seattle, and the coeditor of The Sociology of Housing: How Homes Shape Our Social Lives, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He served as the deputy assistant secretary for policy development at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2022 - 2024.