Now Available: The Updated Mobility App!

A tool to assist people using Housing Choice Vouchers and RAP certificates locate housing in thriving communities.

Mobility counseling is a counseling intervention that ensures that people using government housing subsidies like the Housing Choice Voucher Program have access to full information about available housing options in a range of neighborhoods.  

Open Communities Alliance works with experts on mobility across the country to develop best practices and provide educational information.  In Connecticut, we work to ensure that robust mobility counseling services are available.

Mobility Counseling has proven to be an effective way to assist people using government housing subsidies make voluntary moves out of areas of poverty concentration.  Mobility counseling programs are hard at work in places like Dallas, Baltimore, Chicago, and right here in Connecticut.  Unfortunately, in CT only people who obtain a housing subsidy through the Department of Housing have access to mobility counseling, thus the program is available to about 10,000 people.  The remaining 23,000 voucher holders who work through local housing authorities have no access to such services. 

Furthermore, the Department of Housing program needs to be strengthened with better funding, incentives for families that offset the cost of moving, and the adoption of maximum rents that accurately reflect market rents. Adopting HUD's Small Area Fair Market Rents statewide would be one step in the right direction.

See the kind of difference mobility counseling has made in the lives of families in elsewhere in the country, such as Baltimore and Dallas.