Housing Vouchers and Education Vouchers

Here’s a recent news headline, Can Biden Deliver on His Promise to Expand Housing Vouchers? The link discusses Biden’s efforts to increase housing vouchers which subsidize low-income households to help them rent a home on the private market. Housing vouchers are a solidly Democratic proposal. Moreover, as far as I can tell, there are few people advocating to replace vouchers with public housing. The progressive think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has this to say about vouchers:

Housing Choice Vouchers sharply reduce homelessness and other hardships, lift more than a million people out of poverty, and give families an opportunity to move to safer, less poor neighborhoods. These effects, in turn, are closely linked to educational, developmental, and health benefits that can improve children’s long-term life chances and reduce costs in other public programs.

Here’s the Urban Institute:

The federal Housing Choice Voucher Program plays a critical role in helping to address housing needs for extremely low-income households. Its most important advantage is that vouchers give recipients the freedom to choose the kinds of housing and the locations that best meet their needs. As a consequence, many voucher recipients live in healthy neighborhoods that offer social, educational, and economic opportunities for themselves and their children….even for African Americans and Hispanics, vouchers perform better than public and assisted housing projects in giving families access to low-poverty and racially mixed neighborhoods.

Notice how often the words “opportunity”, “freedom” and “choice” appear. Indeed the testimony from the Urban Institute refers to “the freedom to choose.” Excellent.

I agree with these conclusions. Now here is what is strange. Exactly the same arguments apply to school vouchers and school choice. School vouchers give students the freedom to choose the kinds of schooling and locations that best meet their needs. Yet, while many on the left agree that vouchers are superior to public housing, which tends to freeze the poor into low-quality, poorly maintained housing in poor neighborhoods with a host of cognate problems, they are more reluctant to support education vouchers as superior to public schooling. But all the arguments against public housing also apply to public schooling. Public Housing=Public Schooling. (The right are also strangely reluctant to take credit for housing vouchers even though they have mostly worked in just the way that Milton Friedman would have predicted!)

It’s unclear to me why housing vouchers became accepted on the left but education vouchers are still regarded as suspect. Or to put it the other way, it would be useful to study how housing voucher won over the left.

I look forward to the day when a headline reads, Can the Democratic President Deliver on Her Promise to Expand Education Vouchers?