Right to Housing News

Photo by JM Suarez via Wikimedia Commons

This edition of the newsletter highlights several promising developments in the ongoing struggle to ensure housing for all:

New Study: Timely Rent Assistance Can Prevent Homelessness

In the U.S., more than a half-million people experience homelessness each night, a number so large it exceeds the entire population of Kansas City, Missouri. But public discussion of homelessness with a narrow focus on mental health/addiction issues can miss a critical fact that we see time after time in eviction court: many people become homeless simply because they don’t have the money to pay their rent.

So a new study published earlier this year in The Review of Economics and Statistics should be front-and-center in any future conversation about preventing homelessness.  Researchers from the University of Notre Dame conducted a randomized study of individuals and families at risk of being evicted. Households who were provided emergency financial assistance were a whopping 81% less likely to experience homelessness within the following six months.

Keeping a family housed is not just the morally correct thing to do; it works financially, too. Since a housed person needs far less intervention resources, the researchers found communities get $2.47 in benefits for every dollar they spend on emergency financial assistance. A summary of the study and citation to the full academic article are available here.

This study followed on a recent University of California San Francisco report  from the largest survey of homeless persons in three decades. A strong majority of homeless persons stated that a monthly subsidy of just a few hundred dollars would have kept them housed.

Economists to Biden: Nationwide Rent Control Will Work

At the end of July, thirty-two economists co-signed a letter to President Biden supporting national rent control in buildings that benefit from government-backed mortgages, a number that adds up to nearly a third of U.S. rental housing. 

“The economics 101 model that predicts rent regulations will have negative effects on the housing sector is being proven wrong by empirical studies that better analyze real world dynamics,” the economists wrote.

The letter is significant because the signers push back on the longtime conventional wisdom in their field that rent control will reduce housing supply.  (We reviewed those studies and the historical evidence here.) As the economists’ letter states, recent rent control data are starting to change hearts and minds the same way evidence of the benefits of higher minimum wages did in recent decades.  

The economists submitted their letter as part of the Homes Guarantee campaign we have written about here several times, including here and here. The campaign, directed by People’s Action, also submitted to the Federal Housing Finance Agency 2,400 comments from renters and letters of support from Senators, local elected officials, and academics, all supporting conditioning federal financing on tenant protections including rent control.

We Can’t Build Our Way Out of our Affordable Housing Crisis—From Newsletter to Published Article

Thanks to all who commented and shared our last newsletter post, “Don’t Buy the Hype: Building More Homes Won’t Solve Our Affordable Housing Crisis.”  Your feedback helped inform a reshaping of the post into a full article published over the past weekend in Common Dreams, which you can read here.