Did Emergency Rental Assistance Support Housing Stability During the COVID-19 Pandemic? Differential Effects Across Risk Strata.

The economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic combined with a pre-existing housing affordability crisis to threaten a wave of evictions from rental housing in the United States. Eviction and housing loss were associated with a range of adverse outcomes even prior to the pandemic; during the public health emergency, housing instability could have additionally increased opportunities for viral spread. Mitigating eviction risk was therefore an important form of prevention. We evaluate one federal policy response to the potential eviction crisis, the Emergency Rental Assistance program (ERA). Under ERA, approximately $47 billion was transferred to state and local governments to establish programs to financially assist at-risk renter households. We examine the relationship between receipt of rental assistance and rental housing stability, both overall and for higher-risk groups defined by presence of children and respondent racial and ethnic identity. Our analysis used U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey data (July, 2021-April, 2023) and two analytical techniques. First, we created matched treatment and comparison groups using applicants awaiting a decision and coarsened exact matching (n = 18,329) to examine the relationship between rental assistance and 1) whether the household was in rental arrears and 2) perceived risk of housing loss from eviction. Second, we estimated recursive bivariate probit models simultaneously modeling rental assistance receipt and rental arrears in a larger sample (n = 160,443). We found rental assistance receipt substantially reduced the risk of being in arrears and perceived risk of eviction. Effects on arrears were somewhat larger for households with children and for Black households compared to others in the matching analysis.