Join us for an afternoon with author

Brian McCabe to discuss his new book

The Housing Lottery: How Scarcity Drives America’s Rental Assistance Policies

in conversation with Eva Rosen

to be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE

Tickets are available here!

How scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of our rental assistance programs, including the Housing Choice Voucher program.

It’s no secret that the United States is experiencing a housing crisis. While the cost of rental housing has soared since 2000, the median household income has barely changed. The Housing Choice Voucher program is America’s largest rental assistance program, but most households that are eligible for assistance simply cannot get access to it. Without enough resources to serve every eligible household in their communities, public housing agencies keep waiting lists, run lotteries, and claw back vouchers from households that are unable to meet the demands of the housing market. Despite the enormous benefits that come from affordable housing, it’s simply out of reach for most renters in need.

In The Housing Lottery, sociologist Brian J. McCabe takes readers to the frontlines of these housing agencies to understand how scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of the program. Following the bureaucrats charged with making these decisions about allocating housing resources, McCabe shows how decisions and regulations resulting from scarcity have enormous consequences. He presents extensive evidence about the importance of rental assistance for lifting households out of poverty and creating economic opportunity. To improve housing assistance as a public resource and to combat housing insecurity and its negative effects, McCabe argues for a more inclusive, expansive approach to federal housing policy.

Brian J. McCabe is a Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership and the co-editor The Sociology of Housing: How Homes Shape Our Social Lives. From 2022 - 2024, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. His new book, The Housing Lottery: How Scarcity Drives America’s Rental Assistance Policies, will be published in December 2026.

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Eva Rosen is a Professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. From 2022-2023, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. She is the author of The Voucher Promise: Section 8 and the Fate of an American Neighborhood, which won the Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association and the Paul Davidoff Book Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. She is the co-editor The Sociology of Housing: How Homes Shape Our Social Lives. Her new book, American Landlord: The Dilemma of Profit in a Forever Housing Crisis, will be published next year.