Analyzing Tenant Assignment Policies

This paper discusses two popular policies used by housing authorities to assign applicants to housing projects: first available unit and priority assignment policies. The policies are compared according to their abilities to integrate housing projects, applicant assignment probabilities, and mean waiting times. Our results show that priority policies can successfully integrate public housing projects while first available unit policies can exacerbate segregation. These results support the reported empirical performance of these policies. We briefly consider the time necessary to reach steady state for these policies; this is one point of departure for further research.