The Housing Choice Voucher program was designed to introduce participants to neighborhoods of opportunity. But most fail to find a way in.
Marcella Lansdon set aside her Section 8 voucher and stared at the shaded map of Tempe, searching for the right neighborhood. They all seemed the same. She had come to find a home, but couldn't even figure out where to look.
At the head of a wide conference table in the city library, Tempe Housing Services supervisor Theresa James held up her own copy of the map.
About half of the city was shaded in, marking what was described as prosperity and potential. The rest was left empty, filled only by high poverty and unemployment rates. In those areas, schools performed worse. Houses and apartments sagged with age. Rents were low, but opportunities were few.
"We want you to look beyond those areas," James said. "We want you to look throughout Tempe."
The Housing Choice Voucher program, better known as Section 8, was designed to be the key to neighborhoods of opportunity. But most of the people around James' table would find themselves locked out.
The majority of Maricopa County's Section 8 vouchers trap renters in areas of high poverty, high unemployment and low opportunity, The Arizona Republic found after analyzing data from each of the county's seven housing authorities.
Just 5.8 percent of the county's vouchers are in ZIP codes with a poverty rate under 10 percent, a level widely considered the definition of a low-poverty area.
Rather than spreading poverty thin, Section 8 vouchers have clumped it together. More than 41 percent of Maricopa County's vouchers are located in 15 ZIP codes that have an average poverty rate over 28 percent. Their average median income is under $41,000. The population skews heavily minority.
And local housing authorities have little way to fix it.
Lansdon, 29, worried about the rents as she sat at the table in Tempe. Her three-bedroom voucher was good for a $1,511-a-month unit. It didn't seem like enough money. She wanted a house, somewhere she and her three kids could spread out after months living in her mother's one-bedroom apartment, with room for the fourth child she had just learned was on the way.
She didn't tell Tempe about the baby. Finding a three-bedroom seemed overwhelming enough. Four bedrooms, she assumed, would be impossible.
So she sat quietly for the rest of the meeting, then stuffed her map back in its bright yellow folder and walked outside, into an entire city of options.
The Housing Choice Voucher program often works in reverse.
It's the largest rental assistance program in the country, helping pay the rent of more than 2.2 million households with more than $20 billion in federal funding.
The program was designed to pull America's poorest renters out of crumbling public-housing projects, diluting poverty across cities. It encourages people to move into what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development calls "areas of opportunity," where jobs, education and health care are more readily accessible. Studies have shown that even a move of a few miles can affect a person's future health and economic prospects.
That rarely happens: 21 percent of voucher-using families with children are in low-poverty census tracts nationwide, according to a 2014 study published in the journal Housing Policy Debate.
There are 13,047 Section 8 vouchers in use across Maricopa County, each issued by one of seven local housing authorities. More than 56 percent of those vouchers are located in a ZIP code with a poverty rate over 20 percent, a mark HUD uses to define "high poverty."
About 29 percent of all Maricopa County residents, with or without Section 8 vouchers, live in high-poverty ZIP codes.
Each housing authority provided The Republic with the number of vouchers in each ZIP code within its boundaries as of Aug. 1. The Republic then compared those totals with data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
Sixty vouchers were listed in ZIP codes that either have no census data or do not exist. Those were not included in the analysis.
While no one number can measure the quality of a neighborhood, housing experts say an area's poverty rate is often the best single-number indicator. Low-poverty neighborhoods tend to have lower rates of unemployment, more successful schools and healthier residents.
"If you just think about something that can proxy pretty well for the quality of a neighborhood, poverty rate definitely gets you to a good place," said Jordan Richmond, a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Economic Policy Research who has studied the effects of geography on people's economic futures.
For that reason, The Republic's analysis focused primarily on the relationship between poverty and housing.
But countywide data also shows that more than 20 percent of Section 8 vouchers are located in ZIP codes with an unemployment rate over 10 percent, and that high-voucher areas tend to have larger minority populations.
These ZIP codes in Maricopa County contain the most Section 8 vouchers per capita. The darker colors represent higher numbers of vouchers.
Low opportunity looks like 85007.
The 85007 ZIP code is a thin slice between Seventh and 19th avenues, just west of downtown. Stretching north from the dry brush of the Salt River, it runs through industrial south Phoenix, past the Seventh Avenue Landfill and factories all painted the same soulless beige. Tire shops and used-car dealerships line the streets.
The ZIP code crosses the freeway, claiming the land underneath Arizona's government buildings, including the state Capitol and the Arizona Department of Housing. Then it crosses the freeway again, past the century-old homes of Encanto before stopping at Thomas Road.
It's one of the poorest ZIPs in the county, with more than 40 percent of its population living below the poverty line. The median income is$27,557. More than 13 percent of working-age adults are unemployed, and there are few visible opportunities to find work.
There are almost no low-income apartments, except for the newly renovated Matthew Henson public housing project. Instead, the area is filled with small, single-story houses, 57 percent of which were built before 1960, according to Census data.
The performance of local public schools ranges from mediocre to dramatically below the state average. The only public transportation is a handful of bus lines. There are few parks or playgrounds or streetlights.
The Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan think tank, ranked it among the 900 most distressed ZIP codes nationwide — labeling it the exact kind of area that studies show can limit a child's chances for success.
And yet it contains more Section 8 vouchers per capita than any other ZIP code in Maricopa County.
There are 210 vouchers scattered across 85007, which has a population of about 14,000 people.
Similar concentrations of poverty and vouchers are scattered across the county. The ZIP code 85003, which borders 85007 to the south and contains the second-highest concentration of vouchers, has a poverty rate of 31.5 percent. Central Phoenix's 85015. South Phoenix's 85040. Glendale's 85301.
All have large minority populations, above-average unemployment rates and an aging housing inventory.
All have around three times as many vouchers as the county average.
Twenty-five years ago, the federal government set up an experiment.
The Section 8 program was barely integrating American communities. It had done little to offset decades of racial and economic housing discrimination. Some poor renters were moving into more prosperous neighborhoods, but most took their vouchers and stayed in place.
So HUD created the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing program. It enlisted 4,600 low-income families from public housing projects in five cities — Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York — and split them into three groups. One group was given a standard Section 8 voucher. The second was told to stay in place.
Researchers then checked in with the families over the next two decades. Over and over, children whose families moved with an experimental voucher were shown to have led fuller, healthier, wealthier lives.
Children who grew up with experimental vouchers were less likely to be depressed, become obese, or be diagnosed with diabetes. They graduated high school and attended college at higher rates. They were more likely to hold steady jobs as adults. They earned, on average, 31 percent more than children who grew up with standard vouchers.
All because they had moved to opportunity.
The government hasn't tried the experiment since.
"An expanding body of evidence suggests that children benefit from living in safe, low-poverty neighborhoods with good schools," wrote Barbara Sard and Douglas Rice, analysts for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. They outlined their conclusions in 2016.
The effects of living in a certain area can last until a person's final days. The Economic Innovation Group, another policy organization, found that residents of prosperous ZIP codes live, on average, five years longer than people in distressed neighborhoods.
The life expectancy of a resident of a prosperous American neighborhood is 80 years old, according to the EIG. That matches the European Union.
In distressed areas, life expectancy drops to 75.2 years, about the same as Nicaragua.
In America's largest cities, it can take years before an eligible renter receives a Section 8 voucher. There are application lotteries and points systems and wait lists, with no way to predict how long it will take to move up.
Once a person does make the top of a voucher wait list, the years-long process sparks a rush. There's a meeting at the housing office. Rules are explained. Sometimes there's a map, or a list of suggestions, or an encouragement to look in a certain part of the city.
Then new voucher-holders head into the city, often to learn they have few choices. Rarely are those choices in an "area of opportunity." But their voucher's expiration date looms. They sign a lease.
Local housing authorities say it's a problem of supply and demand, of landlords who aren't required to accept Section 8 and can charge more than a voucher is worth. For years, rent prices have climbed faster than the value of a voucher, and there's little that a bureaucrat with a shaded map can do.
The dollar value of a voucher is based on the area's Fair Market Rent, which HUD usually sets at the 40th percentile of rent prices paid by "recent movers."
But FMRs often cover areas too wide and diverse to be accurate, some housing experts say.
HUD lumps almost all of Maricopa County in the "Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale" region, meaning a Section 8 voucher is worth the same dollar amount in high-priced north Scottsdale as it would would be in south Phoenix.
The same design flaw exists across the country. All of New York City is under one FMR, as are downtown Indianapolis and the eight farmland counties that surround it.
HUD has introduced smaller FMR areas that set different rents in different neighborhoods, but announced in October that the new policies had been suspended.
Other program managers must manage a delicate balance: Fair Housing laws prevent them from directly pushing renters to certain areas, so many try to nudge people in subtle ways.
"You present the information, you provide the logic behind, and then you back away and let folks make their own decisions," Tempe Housing and Revitalization Manager LeVon Lamy said.
Many housing authorities allow families to spend slightly more than 100 percent of a voucher's value, hoping the extra money opens up more rentals. But they receive a set amount of funding, and every percentage-point bump limits the number of families that can get a voucher.
Some cities, like Tempe and Mesa, give out maps and lists of available apartments. Chicago tried offering "mobility counseling" and $500 grants to families who used vouchers in areas of opportunity.
But nothing has worked well enough to be implemented nationwide. Too many factors influence where a family chooses to live: Maybe it's where they grew up, or where the culture is familiar. Maybe it's close to their job. Maybe they wanted four bedrooms, and couldn't afford it elsewhere.
"Someone's desirable neighborhood is somebody else's undesirable neighborhood," Stotler, the Phoenix housing director, said. "I couldn't choose for you where you want to live."
HUD Secretary Ben Carson, who early in his administration has tried to promote public-private partnerships, believes the solution is not moving renters to good neighborhoods. Instead, he told The Arizona Republic, the country will improve its bad ones.
The search immediately overwhelmed Marcella Lansdon. The map didn't help, because the prosperous shaded area had no three-bedroom apartments her voucher could afford. Her voucher came with an expiration date. She had 60 days to comb an entire city for one apartment.
She called through the entire list Tempe provided. Nothing. She tried every listing on the internet. Still nothing. A friend offered to drive her around the city, thinking it might be simpler to search for apartments in person. Landlord after landlord told her they didn't accept Section 8 vouchers. One told her she was looking in the wrong neighborhood. But she didn't know what the right neighborhood was.
The deadline drew near. One apartment accepted her, but the rent was $200 more than her voucher would cover. She called Tempe and asked for a few more dollars, but the city couldn't afford it.
She widened her search, checking out two-bedroom apartments in the parts of Tempe that James had warned to avoid. Still, she found nothing. She asked for an extension of her deadline. Tempe declined.
With a couple of weeks to spare, Lansdon put away her voucher and decided to move in with her boyfriend. Together they found a two-bedroom apartment, splitting the $1,000-a-month rent.
It's too small. The rent is too high. Her kids' schools rank below average. Sometimes she takes the kids to play in nearby Perry Park, but it doesn't feel safe.
They live in 85018, in east Phoenix. Their new ZIP code has almost twice as many Section 8 vouchers as the rest of the county.