Segmented information, segregated outcomes: Housing affordability and neighborhood representation on a voucher-focused online housing platform and three mainstream alternatives
Christian Hess1, Rebecca Walter2, Ian Kennedy2, Arthur Acolin2, Alex Ramiller3, Kyle Crowder2
1Cornell University, 2University of Washington, 3University of California–Berkeley
Online platforms have become an integral component of the housing search process in the United States and other developed contexts, and recent studies have investigated how these platforms vary in their representation of different neighborhoods. In this study, we assess how GoSection8, a platform uniquely focused on affordable housing and voucher-assisted households, compares with “mainstream” alternatives of Craigslist, Apartments.com and Zillow. Through analyses of the housing and neighborhoods represented on these platforms, we advance a new multisource perspective on the role of online information exchanges in the housing search process. Specifically, we find that GoSection8 and mainstream alternatives capture spatially-segmented information about housing markets, with GoSection8 ads more affordable but also more likely to constrain housing searches to higher-poverty neighborhoods where assisted households are already concentrated. The two-tiered information we observe implies that the disadvantaged households potentially see a limited set of opportunities when using the internet to find housing.