INTRODUCTIONOn September 30th, with generous support from the Wells Fargo Foundation, the Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP) convened leading researchers studying emergency rental assistance (ERA) at the University of Pennsylvania. The group included researchers and officials in the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); researchers from academic and nonprofit institutes; and practitioners.
The day-long, closed-door session was an opportunity to take stock of what is currently known about ERA’s implementation and impact, to identify what is still unknown, and to discuss how ERA should inform housing and emergency policy going forward. This summary highlights key takeaways from this rich conversation. Participants also contributed to a Research Directory with information about past, current, and forthcoming research related to ERA. |
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BACKGROUND: THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF ERA
In March 2020, the economic shutdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic threatened a wave of evictions, with dire implications for the health and stability of American families. State and local governments responded with emergency interventions to keep low- and moderate-income renters in their homes. One common approach was to provide emergency rental assistance payments to tenants and landlords to cover forward and back rent.
Early emergency rental assistance programs received funding from a variety of sources including CARES-Act block grants administered by HUD and the Coronavirus Relief Fund administered by the U.S. Treasury; they often distributed one-time, relatively modest, payments as quickly as possible.
In December 2020, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act which created the Treasury Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) Program and invested it with $25 billion; in January 2021, Congress allocated an additional $21.55 billion to the Treasury ERA Program via the American Rescue Plan. In the first quarter of 2021, Treasury distributed this unprecedented amount of funding to state and local governments throughout the country. Treasury’s ERA funding expanded many existing local programs and prompted hundreds of new programs to be developed across the country. Assistance to individual households was typically much larger than what was available through earlier emergency rental assistance programs. Treasury created guidelines outlining how these funds should be spent, but states and localities were given significant flexibility in the design and implementation of their ERA programs. Taken together, these efforts represent a unique national effort to secure housing for low- and extremely low-income renters during an emergency situation with tremendous opportunity to learn about the effectiveness of different approaches and strategies implemented in different places.
Currently, many jurisdictions are running out of federal funding for ERA and are either winding down their programs or transitioning to more long-term models of assistance. With the midterm elections approaching, it is an opportune moment to assess our knowledge of this program.
Early emergency rental assistance programs received funding from a variety of sources including CARES-Act block grants administered by HUD and the Coronavirus Relief Fund administered by the U.S. Treasury; they often distributed one-time, relatively modest, payments as quickly as possible.
In December 2020, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act which created the Treasury Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) Program and invested it with $25 billion; in January 2021, Congress allocated an additional $21.55 billion to the Treasury ERA Program via the American Rescue Plan. In the first quarter of 2021, Treasury distributed this unprecedented amount of funding to state and local governments throughout the country. Treasury’s ERA funding expanded many existing local programs and prompted hundreds of new programs to be developed across the country. Assistance to individual households was typically much larger than what was available through earlier emergency rental assistance programs. Treasury created guidelines outlining how these funds should be spent, but states and localities were given significant flexibility in the design and implementation of their ERA programs. Taken together, these efforts represent a unique national effort to secure housing for low- and extremely low-income renters during an emergency situation with tremendous opportunity to learn about the effectiveness of different approaches and strategies implemented in different places.
Currently, many jurisdictions are running out of federal funding for ERA and are either winding down their programs or transitioning to more long-term models of assistance. With the midterm elections approaching, it is an opportune moment to assess our knowledge of this program.
LEARNING FROM THE FUNDING AND ADMINISTRATION OF ERA
Rebecca Yae, Emma Foley, and Neetu Nair of the National Low Income Housing Coalition presented “ERA Program Design, Implementation, and Spending Overview,” which included findings from a forthcoming paper written in partnership with Claudia Aiken (HIP) about the variation across states and localities in how ERA programs were designed and implemented. This presentation was followed by remarks from discussant Kate Reynolds (Urban Institute) and by a full-group discussion. Key points from the presentation included:
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LEARNING ABOUT THE IMPACT OF ERA
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ERA spending combined with local, state, and federal eviction moratoria is widely thought to have played a central role in curbing eviction and ensuring housing stability for vulnerable renters during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, researchers are just beginning to measure ERA’s empirical impact on housing and financial stability during the pandemic and after. Two presentations featured preliminary findings about the impact of ERA on tenants. Katharine Nelson and Cypress Marrs (HIP) presented early findings from their evaluation of California's statewide ERA Program. Rob Collinson (University of Notre Dame) presented findings from a cross-university team of researchers about the impact of ERA on financial and housing stability in Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Following these presentations Peggy Bailey (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) and Martha Galvez (Housing Solutions Lab, NYU Furman Center) made remarks and the full group participated in a conversation about how we evaluate ERA’s impact. Key points from the presentations included:
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LEARNING ABOUT ERA AND THE COURTS
Lauren Sudeall (Georgia State University) and Philip Garboden (University of Hawaii) presented initial findings from a study led by Elora Raymond (Georgia Tech) on the role local courts played in preserving housing stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this presentation, Vikram Patel (Community Legal Services) made remarks informed by his experience providing representation to low income clients in Philadelphia housing court throughout the pandemic. Key points from the presentation included:
- Local courts played an essential role in determining the role ERA funds played in various parts of the country. In some places, courts and program officials collaborated to help tenants avoid eviction by providing rental assistance. As ERA funds are spent down, these relationships may continue to play an important role, such as through local eviction diversion programs.
- It may have been easier for courts to implement new programs or partnerships to distribute ERA funds to tenants and landlords facing eviction than to enforce moratoria on evictions because of a dynamic of "accordance" and "discordance." ERA exists outside the traditional legal structure, can speed up the case flow, and compensates landlords, all of which encourages judges to participate. Moratoria, meanwhile, may strike judges as counter to “the law,” inhibit case flows, and infringe on landlords’ property rights. As a result, in order for housing stability interventions to be effective, they should be crafted in a way that aligns with the values of the court and be as explicit as possible in their goals and means.
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THE FUTURE OF ERA
Experts gathered on September 30th identified a number of areas that would benefit from further consideration by researchers, policymakers, administrators, and advocates as the legacy of ERA is defined and lessons are integrated into future work. Much of the conversation throughout the day centered around several themes:
Defining and measuring the outcomes of ERA.
Understanding ERA’s relationship to other subsidy programs.
Overcoming the digital divide.
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Collecting and using data more wisely.
- Multiple participants cited the need for better data to map and measure the need for rental assistance, and the necessity of understanding the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on that need. Much more is known about mortgage payments than about rent payments, and useful sources of data such the National Multifamily Housing Council’s (NMHC) rent database and the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey are only available temporarily.
- One participant asked, given that we have already collected eligibility information from low-income households for other programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, and given that these households have a high risk of falling behind on rent, whether it would be possible to use administrative data to speed up enrollment in ERA programs now or in the future.
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Understanding the landlord’s role and motivation.
Understanding the roles of contractors, staffing, and technical assistance.
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- Participants wanted to know more about the evolution of sometimes informal, unpaid partnerships between housing agencies and nonprofits that were frequently crucial for outreach and tenant support. Attendees suggested these relationships may have become formalized over ERA deployment, with important lessons for emergency policy formation.
- Attendees were particularly interested in ERA program reliance on third-party contractors for I.T. and application processing, and the implications of this for balancing program efficiency with hands-on interactions with tenants. They suggested that the structure of contracts with external service providers may have exerted an important, if often overlooked, influence on the pace of disbursement, with some contracts incentivizing rapid rollout and others rewarding service providers for maintaining a large backlog of unserved tenants.
- HUD gradually delivered technical assistance to local ERA programs, but more research is needed to understand the scope and character of assistance provided and how this impacted ERA programs.
Evaluating the influence of federal audits.
- A fear of being audited may have played a substantial role in the willingness of programs to adopt new processes for reviewing and approving applications, even when these new processes were endorsed or even encouraged by Treasury.
- Federal audits of post-recession relief programs in 2009 and 2010 penalized some communities and may have left them with a fear of adopting less stringent application requirements, even when explicitly permitted by federal guidance. ERA administrators were also, in many cases, used to running federal programs with very strict documentation requirements and may have been slow to introduce new burden-reducing methods for approving applications because of this.
- In some cases, cautionary arguments about the risk of federal audits by conservative local auditors overseeing ERA programs may have been motivated not just by a desire to prevent fraud but also by discriminatory attitudes toward low-income renters and renters of color.
Recognizing the need for ongoing infrastructure.
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ERA CONVENING ATTENDEES
The Wells Fargo Foundation's generous support made this convening possible. We thank them and acknowledge that any conclusions presented here are those of the convening attendees and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Wells Fargo Foundation.
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SONYA ACOSTA
Senior Policy Analyst Center on Budget and Policy Priorities CLAUDIA AIKEN Director Housing Initiative at Penn ANDREW AURAND Vice President for Research National Low Income Housing Coalition PEGGY BAILEY Vice President for Housing Policy Center on Budget and Policy Priorities EMILY BENFER Visiting Professor of Clinical Law George Washington University JUNG CHOI Senior Research Associate Urban Institute ROB COLLINSON Wilson Family LEO Assistant Professor University of Notre Dame ANNA DUAN Research Analyst Housing Initiative at Penn EMMA FOLEY Research Analyst National Low Income Housing Coalition MARTHA GALVEZ Executive Director Housing Solutions Lab, NYU Furman Center PHILIP GARBODEN HCRC Professor in Affordable Housing University of Hawaii SOLOMON GREENE Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ERIN HAHN Research Analyst Texas Housers MARGARET HALTOM Director of Emergency Rental Assistance and Housing Policy Neighborhood Preservation, Inc. PETER HEPBURN Assistant Professor Rutgers University, Newark JARED JACKSON Research Assistant Housing Initiative at Penn REED JORDAN Housing Affordability Grant Program Manager Wells Fargo Foundation DANYA KEENE Associate Professor Yale University ELIZABETH KNEEBONE Assistant Vice President for Community Development Research Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco YEONHWA LEE Doctoral Candidate University of Pennsylvania |
ELLIE LOCHHEAD
Predoctoral Research Fellow NYU Furman Center CYPRESS MARRS Research Analyst Housing Initiative at Penn BEN MARTIN Research Director Texas Housers BRIAN MCCABE Deputy Assistant Director for Policy Development U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development CHRISTINA MICHAEL Research Assistant Housing Initiative at Penn NEETU NAIR Research Analyst National Low Income Housing Coalition KATHARINE NELSON Director of Research Housing Initiative at Penn ZACH NEUMANN Executive Director COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project VIKRAM PATEL Supervising Attorney, Housing Unit Community Legal Services CHARLIE RAFKIN Doctoral Candidate Massachusetts Institute of Technology GINA RENDINA Policy Advisor, Emergency Housing Team U.S. Department of the Treasury KATE REYNOLDS Principal Policy Associate, Research to Action Lab Urban Institute CHARLES RUTHEISER Senior Associate Annie E. Casey Foundation AARON SHROYER Special Advisor to the Assistant Secretary U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development LAUREN SUDEALL Professor of Law Georgia State University CAROLYN SWOPE Doctoral Candidate Columbia University WINNIE VAN DIJK Assistant Professor Harvard University STEPHEN WHITLOW Senior Associate Abt Associates REBECCA YAE Senior Research Analyst National Low Income Housing Coalition YIHAN ZHANG Research Assistant Housing Initiative at Penn |