COVID-19 and Housing

COVID-19 AND HOUSING

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, many jurisdictions created or expanded their emergency rental assistance programs to stem evictions and keep renters in their homes. HIP initially engaged in deep partnerships with housing and community development officials in six cities to provide housing policy expertise and data analysis to inform rent relief program design; to analyze applicants vis-à-vis the pool of eligible households to ensure equity and targeted outreach as programs roll out; and to embed evaluation instruments into the programs themselves. These partnerships revealed the depth of need among cities for additional capacity to design, implement, and evaluate their emergency housing responses. As additional funding has become available for rental assistance programs, we have expanded our partner network to include additional jurisdictions and have also engaged in national survey work in collaboration with the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the NYU Furman Center.

rental assistance evaluation partnerships

The Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP) is currently partnering with the cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, as well as the County of Los Angeles, the California Community Foundation, and the State of California to evaluate their emergency rental assistance programs. As part of these evaluations, HIP invites program applicants to participate in an optional survey after they complete their rent relief application to gain insight on applicants and their financial precarity. Applicants also have the option to enroll in the larger study, which allows us to link their survey responses to their application data as well as to larger administrative datasets on outcomes like evictions, mobility, and interactions with other public resources. HIP then resurveys applicants in multiple rounds of follow-up surveys in order to determine the impact of receiving rental assistance on long-term outcomes.

In some sites, HIP has also surveyed rental property owners whose tenants apply for assistance, in order to better understand their needs and decisions to engage with rental assistance programs. In addition, HIP is now engaging in a comparative cross-city study in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame and at Harvard, Yale, and Northwestern Universities.

Latest Publications

Emergency Assistance Outreach: Evaluating Strategies to Reach and Support Vulnerable Tenants During the COVID-19 Pandemic in California

California's COVID-19 Rent Relief Program: Analysis of Applications as of April 2022

The Need for Rental Assistance in Los Angeles City and County

Residential Rental Property Owner Perspectives in Philadelphia

Acknowledgement

Thank you to our funders, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Hilton Foundation, and Stoneleigh Foundation. We thank them for their support but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented are those of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of these funders.

nationwide emergency rental assistance programs

In addition to partnering with individual localities, HIP is studying emergency rental assistance programs nationwide in collaboration with the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the NYU Furman Center. In late Summer and Fall of 2020, we conducted the first survey of 220 emergency rental assistance program administrators across the country. As Congress has appropriated additional funds to support these programs, we have conducted ongoing surveys to understand how rental assistance continues to evolve.

Latest Publications