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COVID-19 AND HOUSING |
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America's housing landscape is deeply inequitable. Unsafe housing conditions, restricted housing choices, and unaffordable housing costs are overwhelmingly concentrated among low-income, non-White households. COVID-19 has severely exacerbated these existing inequities. Infections are disproportionately concentrated among Black and Brown residents, and COVID-19-related job losses have hit the service industry particularly hard, leaving many low-income families without income to pay for necessities - including housing.
In May of 2020, HIP convened a group of six cities across the country in order to facilitate a discussion about housing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This convening revealed the depth of need among cities for additional capacity to design, implement, and evaluate their emergency housing responses. Over the course of the summer, we have engaged in deep partnerships with housing and community development officials in six cities—Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia—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. |
