The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) and the evolving governance of public housing in the US

In this paper, I show how public housing authorities (PHAs) are implementing the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), an underexamined public housing preservation and redevelopment program across the United States (US). Accessing administrative data, I paint a picture of RAD’s initial implementation, including the non-public actors assuming ownership and management of public housing. I then conduct interviews with PHA officials in six US cities leading in the most common ownership and management combinations in RAD’s implementation across Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia. Through the interviews, I shed light on how PHAs in a diverse range of US cities are adopting different governance structures as they seek to preserve the public provision and preservation of affordable housing against a landscape of decreasing funding. This article makes a critical descriptive contribution to the literature on recent changes to US public housing administration, expanding upon existing literature on public housing hybridity while proposing an exploratory framework for considering the ongoing role of the public sector in public-private-non-profit partnerships for social service provision.