Commentary: Strengthening Implementation and Outcomes in HUD’s Family Self-Sufficiency Program

Jeffrey Lubell
Housing Innovations Group

The recent publication of the final report from the latest U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) study on the Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program—a long-term effort HUD began in 2012—provides an opportune time to consider the broader body of research on FSS and related programs and the experiences of FSS practitioners. Taken together, the articles in this Cityscape symposium on the FSS program cover a lot of ground and highlight past research findings and current policy issues. This symposium includes three articles summarizing formal research. The first illustrates findings from a HUD-sponsored, MDRC-led study of 18 FSS programs (Verma, 2025). The second presents findings from a series of studies that Abt Associates (now Abt Global) conducted on FSS programs run by the nonprofit Compass Working Capital (Sanga et al., 2025), and the third describes early findings from the MyGoals program (Castells, 2025), another housing-based self-sufficiency program. This volume also includes an overview of the experience of multifamily FSS programs (Cramer and McCarthy, 2025), an overview of Compass’ FSS programs (Cramer and Reuter, 2025), and several commentaries, including this one.