Relief Measures Reduced Hardship for Renters During Pandemic, but Many Still Struggle to Pay Rent in Every State

The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic caused millions of households to fall behind on rent, putting them at risk of eviction and homelessness. By September 2020, 55 percent of adult renters reported a loss of income due to COVID-19, reflecting the dramatic decline in low-wage employment as a result of the pandemic. Policymakers took unprecedented measures to keep renters in their homes, including an eviction moratorium put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that helped prevent an estimated 1.55 million eviction filings while in effect from September 2020 to August 2021. To help renters with past-due and current rent bills, policymakers also allocated $47 billion of emergency rental assistance, split into two rounds of funding: $25 billion from the December 2020 relief package and $22 billion from the American Rescue Plan.

While many communities initially did not have existing systems in place to distribute aid effectively, disbursement of funds accelerated in the fall of 2021. Nearly 5.3 million households received emergency rental assistance between January 2021 and March 2022, likely playing a key role in preventing a surge in evictions after the end of the national eviction moratorium in August 2021.

This emergency aid is helping renters at risk of eviction pay accumulated back rent and is keeping families safely housed, but it is only temporary. Some communities, such as Los Angeles and Montgomery County in Maryland, have already closed their emergency rental assistance programs, while state-run programs in California, Texas, and Minnesota have stopped taking new applications due to dwindling funds. Nationally, the emergency rental assistance program is on pace to deplete funds by late 2022, adding to the urgency of addressing the underlying housing instability that made millions of renters vulnerable to losing their homes during the pandemic. Expanding ongoing rental assistance programs to meet significant unmet need is a critical first step, starting with a major expansion of vouchers.

Section 1: Rent Hardship Remains High, Especially for Renters of Color and Families With Children

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Hardship among renters has fallen from the very high levels reached in late 2020 and early 2021, likely due to a combination of emergency rental assistance, support provided through other relief measures such as the expanded Child Tax Credit, and a strong economic recovery that has shrunk unemployment.

While a strong economy will hopefully be long-lasting, many of the measures that have helped families afford rent are temporary, and millions of renters still struggle to afford housing, reflecting both sharp increases in rent and utility costs along with high levels of housing hardship that long predate the pandemic and stem from the sizable gap between many households’ income and the cost of housing in their communities. The number of adult renters reporting to the Census Bureau that their household was not caught up on rent fell from a peak of 15 million in January 2021, but remained at an estimated 10.4 million — 14 percent of adult renters — in data collected March 2, 2022 -March 7, 2022.^[1]

Over the course of the pandemic, renters of color were consistently more likely to report that their household was not caught up on rent, reflecting, in part, the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black and Latino workers. Black and Latino renters were also more likely to be cost burdened by rent (paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent) compared to white renters prior to the pandemic.

Sixty-five percent of Latino adult renters and 57 percent of Black adult renters reported loss of income due to COVID-19 in September 2020, compared to 51 percent of white adult renters. Black and Latino households that experienced a COVID-19-related job loss are disproportionately likely to have accrued rental debt, in part because they tend to have less accumulated wealth and less access to emergency savings than white households to help them get through an unexpected temporary loss of income. As a result, research shows the increase in eviction filings after the CDC moratorium ended disproportionately displaced renters of color.

Families with children were consistently more likely during the pandemic to fall behind on rent compared to renters without children in their household. Before the pandemic exacerbated hardship for children and their families, many were already experiencing housing instability. Research also indicates that presence of children in a household significantly increases eviction risk, partly due to housing discrimination against families with children and higher housing costs that particularly stretch the budgets of single-parent households and force some families into overcrowded and doubled-up living situations.

Section 2: Hardship Highest in South and New York

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While housing hardship is widespread across the country, renters in the South and Northeast were more likely than those in the West and Midwest to report that their household was behind on rent during the pandemic. High levels of housing hardship in New York drove up overall hardship in the Northeast, due to the state’s large renter population: New York is home to over 43 percent of the Northeast's adult renters. While renters in New York have higher incomes, on average, than in many other parts of the country, high rents coupled with the pandemic’s large impact on employment in New York likely help explain the high levels of housing hardship there.

In the South, by contrast, the high levels of hardship are likely driven less by high rents and more by low renter incomes that have stagnated in recent years in many states across the region .

Eight of the ten states with the greatest housing hardship during the pandemic are in the South. (New York and New Jersey round out the top ten.)

Mississippi renters experienced the most severe hardship in the country, with an average of 24 percent of adult renters reporting their household was behind on rent at some point between September 2020 and March 2022.

Renters in the South also reported the greatest fear of eviction: an average of 61 percent of adult renters behind on rent in Louisiana reported eviction was at least somewhat likely in the next two months. Over half of adult renters behind on rent in Georgia (54 percent), Mississippi (52 percent), and South Carolina (51 percent) reported similar fear of eviction.

The most severe housing hardship was concentrated in Southern states where a large share of adult renters are Black.

For example, the two states where adult renters were most likely to report being behind on rent, Mississippi (24 percent) and Louisiana (23 percent), also have the largest Black share of adult renters (51 and 45 percent, respectively).

This overlap of race and housing hardship reflects racial inequities in both pre-existing hardship and the pandemic’s economic impact. Due to a long history of racist housing policies and discrimination in education and employment, Black renters are more likely to have lower incomes, be cost burdened, and experience other forms of housing instability, such as eviction and homelessness, compared to other racial/ethnic groups. As a result, Black renters were especially vulnerable to falling behind on rent during the pandemic, particularly those who experienced a COVID-19-related loss of employment income.

Many low-income households were already burdened by housing costs before the pandemic worsened hardship. Twenty-one percent of all adult renters lived in low-income households paying over half their income for housing before the pandemic, with renters in some states experiencing even greater hardship.

For example, nearly 1 in 4 adult renters in New York lived in low-income households paying over half their income for housing according to Census data from 2015 to 2019; renters in Florida, Louisiana, and California reported similarly high rent burdens.

Unlike the affordability issues in coastal areas often caused by high housing costs, hardship in Southern states is largely driven by low renter incomes. Louisiana, for example, has much lower rents, on average, than California and New York, but it also has one of the lowest median renter incomes of any state.

Pre-pandemic housing hardship left many renters in a financially precarious position, with fewer resources to weather the most severe recession in decades, as COVID-19 caused a rapid spike in unemployment.

Section 3: Hardship and Policy Responses Varied Among States, as Georgia and Minnesota Illustrate

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Housing hardship, and each state’s policy response, varied greatly during the pandemic. The stark contrast between Georgia and Minnesota illustrates these differences. The share of adult renters behind on rent has fallen from its early 2021 peak in both states. But over the course of the pandemic, adult renters in Georgia were nearly twice as likely to fall behind on rent, on average, compared to renters in Minnesota (20 percent versus 12 percent, respectively). This divide highlights differences in each state’s policy landscape, before and during the pandemic.

The two states responded differently as unemployment surged in the early months of the pandemic. Minnesota swiftly implemented a statewide eviction moratorium in March 2020, preventing eviction filings except for emergency reasons. State and local tenant protections in Georgia, conversely, were virtually non-existent, leaving only national protections to prevent most at-risk renters from losing their homes.

Georgia renters’ greater fear of eviction is also partly explained by differences in each state’s emergency rental assistance programs. While both states struggled initially, Minnesota eventually became one of the country’s most effective distributors of emergency aid, completely exhausting its first round of funds provided by the December 2020 relief bill by March 2022. Georgia, however, helped many fewer renters than it could have during this period, distributing only 42 percent of its first round of funds.

Disbursement remained sluggish even as eviction filings began to rise across Georgia in the fall of 2021. Local governments in Georgia, which received a relatively small amount of money, have successfully distributed all of their allotted emergency aid. Meanwhile, the state program, which oversees the bulk of emergency aid, has paid out only 25 percent of its funds to renters in need. Nearly 87,000 households in Minnesota and nearly 72,000 households in Georgia received emergency aid to help them avoid eviction by March 2022.

While Minnesota had lower overall hardship and distributed emergency rental assistance to more households, racial disparities persisted both there and in Georgia. Black renters in Minnesota experienced disproportionately high hardship, just as Black renters in Georgia did: 31 percent of Black adult renters in Minnesota reported their household was not caught up on rent, compared to 26 percent of Black adult renters in Georgia.

Additionally, Black renters in Minnesota were over three times as likely and American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and multiracial adults taken together over twice as likely as white adult renters to fall behind on rent, reflecting similar disparities in pre-pandemic housing hardship.

While swift enactment of strong tenant protections kept evictions low in Minnesota through most of the pandemic, policymakers must do more to ensure that renters of color have stable, affordable housing going forward. Eviction filings have climbed past pre-pandemic levels since state protections lapsed, leaving Minnesota’s renters of color particularly vulnerable to losing their homes.

Section 4: Persistent Housing Hardship Requires Long-Term Solutions

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Millions of households remain months behind on rent, placing them at immediate risk of eviction and homelessness. Rapidly rising rents and utility costs will further squeeze the finances of renters in the coming year, with rent costs having already risen 4.8 percent from April 2021 to April 2022. States must urgently address this hardship by quickly disbursing remaining emergency aid to keep families stably housed as they continue to recover from the devastating impact of the pandemic. However, this temporary funding for emergency aid will run out, and it is not a substitute for long-term solutions such as expanding rental assistance to all eligible renters.

Policymakers should fund long overdue renovations to existing public housing stock and increase the supply of affordable housing by expanding the Housing Trust Fund. Most importantly, policymakers should expand programs such as Housing Choice Vouchers to help the over 16 million low-income renter households in need of rental assistance to afford stable housing.

States should supplement these efforts by leveraging their Fiscal Recovery Funds (FRF) to produce more affordable rental housing, replenish emergency rental assistance funds, and create or expand existing state and local rental assistance and eviction and homelessness prevention programs. States with high pre-pandemic housing costs such as California, Washington, and Colorado managed to keep housing hardship below the national average during the pandemic, in part by allocating a significant share of their FRF toward housing assistance.

Many states investing FRF into housing assistance, including New Jersey, Washington, and Oregon, had existing state rental assistance programs they could scale up and local nonprofit capacity to quickly disburse emergency aid. Other states, like California and Connecticut, are using the federal funds to expand legal services for tenants facing eviction. Innovative solutions like California’s Homekey program have converted hotels and motels into permanent supportive housing, providing shelter for thousands of people experiencing or at risk of homelessness.

States should secure longer-term funding for state and local rental assistance programs and tap remaining emergency funds to ensure safe and stable housing for all their residents.

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