From Disaster to Recovery: Welcome to 2021

We’ve been waiting 10 months to say this—welcome to 2021!

2020 was tough for the entire world, and also for our country. As we endured lockdowns and weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, our homes and our land took on new meaning and importance.

The United States infamously bungled its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in our country suffering 20% of the world’s COVID deaths despite having only 4% of the world’s population. Our slow and uneven crisis response did not put us on a path to an equitable recovery, and as a result our economy shrunk by more than 4% in 2020 and our unemployment rate jumped to 6.7%, from 3.5% this time last year. Worse yet, as the virus ravaged our country and our economy, our President and Congress failed for eight months to deliver any stimulus package, leaving tens of millions of people in freefall.

Unsurprisingly, these macro factors had disastrous consequences for housing security across the United States. Ten percent of Americans say they are behind on rent or mortgage payments, and researchers estimate that tens of millions of renters are at risk of eviction.

Faced with this catastrophe unfolding at home, the Future of Land & Housing team turned our attention inward. We mapped and analyzed our country’s changing rates of evictions and mortgage foreclosures, and spoke with government officials, housing advocates, real estate developers, journalists, lawyers, service providers, and community members to understand why people were losing their homes, and what happened to them after they were displaced.

The resulting report—Displaced in America—has been viewed nearly 12,000 times in the four months since its release. Municipal leaders in our research sites have used our data to prioritize COVID-related housing funds and outreach, and to inform housing and rental assistance bills.

We also convened a series of public conversations about the housing crisis unfolding in front of our eyes, and how to solve it. Over the course of the year we held six public events, two private roundtables, and countless private briefings on home loss for mayors, city councils, congressional staff, local eviction and foreclosure task forces, researchers, advocates, and more.

As we shared our depressing findings, we also began to see paths forward. We saw clues of how we could—in President Joe Biden’s words—“build back better” to a housing landscape that not only fixes the COVID housing crisis but also addresses the systemic injustices that made it so disastrous to begin with.

We will dedicate our 2021 domestic housing portfolio to building on these clues, with an eye towards moving from disaster to recovery.

For example, we noticed in 2020 that poor eviction data was leaving cities and counties blind about who was being impacted by the ongoing eviction crisis. In December we partnered with The Rockefeller Foundation to bring together stakeholders from across the housing, data, and municipal innovation spaces in order to discuss this problem and propose solutions. In 2021 we will build on this effort to develop public good tools as well as policy proposals to ensure that our local governments have the data they need to address evictions and mortgage foreclosures.

We also noticed that evictions around the U.S. spike during the summer. This insight gives cities critical information about when to step up housing support. In 2021 we hope to understand why these spikes are happening.

As we mapped evictions and foreclosures, we saw that neighborhoods in which families lacked health insurance experienced higher levels of housing loss. This correlation was surprisingly strong—sometimes more so than race and income. In 2021 we hope to dig deeper and better understand how a dwindling social safety net impacts housing security.

In 2021 we will also revisit topics that we neglected last year as we put out fires at home.

Through our exciting work with USAID’s Integrated Natural Resource Management project, we will refocus our attention to global land and resource rights, as part of an integrated environmental agenda.

We will look at the impacts of climate change on land and housing, starting with the work of our 2021 fellow, Dona Stewart, on the housing impacts of managed retreat.

And, we will refocus on technology as an enabler for billions around the world to map, document, and defend the rights to their land and homes. Expect much more from our Project Visible, an effort to help smartphone users around the world use their digital trails to prove where they live.

None of this work could possible without the collaborations we built in 2020. Last year we were fortunate to build relationships with an incredible number of academic partners, funders, NGOs, tech companies, and government agencies. These partners, who are too numerous to name here, provided local context to our national work, connected us to powerful networks who enriched and amplified our research, and asked fascinating questions that launched us down new and unexpected paths.

We look forward to continuing to collaborate with all of you in 2021, hopefully in-person as the pandemic recedes. Thank you for joining us on this journey, and here’s to a bright 2021.

—The Future of Land & Housing Team