Professor Seongkyung Cho published two articles on source of income (SOI) antidiscrimination laws in leading journals in urban and housing policy. The first study, published in Housing Policy Debate, analyzes why some U.S. cities adopt laws prohibiting discrimination against housing voucher holders, finding that policy diffusion, vertical policy pressure, election dynamics, and local socioeconomic factors significantly influence adoption patterns. The second study, published in Journal of Urban Affairs, examines how landlords respond to these laws in practice through analysis of online landlord forums, revealing various strategies used to circumvent SOI protections despite legal obligations. These studies provide insights and implications for both the political adoption and practical implementation challenges of policies aimed at reducing housing discrimination against voucher holders.
Cho, S., & Lucio, J. (2025). Vouchers Welcome Here: Source of Income Antidiscrimination Laws in American Cities. Housing Policy Debate, 1-21.
Source of income (SOI) discrimination, or discrimination against voucher holders, poses a significant barrier to the Housing Choice Voucher Program’s policy goals, as it limits voucher holders’ ability to use their vouchers or move to opportunity neighborhoods. SOI antidiscrimination laws aim to deter this discrimination by making it illegal. While SOI protection laws have been an important initiative in the broader strategy to combat housing discrimination, further discussion is needed to explore why more cities have not adopted these laws and what factors might motivate them to do so. Using an ordered logit model within a discrete-time event history analysis framework, this study analyzes data built from five sources to explore SOI ordinance adoption in U.S. cities. The study finds that horizontal policy diffusion, vertical policy coercion, election-year dynamics, and local socioeconomic factors significantly influence SOI ordinance adoption and strength.
Lucio, J., & Cho, S. (2025). Can I (still) refuse housing vouchers? Source of income protections and landlord strategies. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1-16.
Source of Income (SOI) antidiscrimination laws are a policy mechanism to protect low-income renters by making it illegal to discriminate against legal source of income, including housing vouchers. Recent studies show that the legal prohibition of SOI discrimination enhances voucher success and utilization rates and mitigates landlords’ refusal of housing vouchers in some jurisdictions. An underexamined mechanism is how landlords react to and discuss the SOI laws. Considering that landlords’ perspectives and decisions on housing vouchers are dependent on local contexts, understanding the reactions and behaviors of the local stakeholders may be an important step to finding ways to enhance the effectiveness of SOI protections. This study uses qualitative content analysis to examine landlords’ reactions and strategies toward SOI antidiscrimination laws by looking at idiosyncratic text data scrapped from five online landlords’ forums. Findings include landlords’ feelings about the HCV program, strategies that landlords use to circumvent SOI antidiscrimination laws, and policy implications for increasing the success of the HCV program.
