Abstract

The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) Program is designed to address a $26 billion public housing capital needs backlog. New investment is leveraged by converting public housing to project-based assistance, with ownership transferred to nonprofit and private entities. In other words, RAD is expediting the end of the country’s 80-year-old public housing program. While this may seem like a dramatic policy shift, there is actually little about RAD that is new. This investigation of RAD’s origins reveals it to be the coalescence of existing programs, established policies, and longstanding trends multiple decades in the making. This in turn helps explain why RAD has expanded so quickly and why its expansion is likely to continue. There exists a great need for more research on and monitoring of RAD’s implementation, and for a reassessment of the policy priorities that produced both the program itself and the problem it attempts to solve.