Introduction: Past, Present, and COVID

When we embarked on this project more than a year ago, we could have never predicted its salience today. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States, it rapidly became clear that we would release this report at a time when millions of Americans are without jobs and at risk of losing their housing. This report became more than a way to document historic housing loss, but a tool municipal leaders could use to better understand pandemic-related housing loss in their own communities.

Every year, almost 5 million Americans lose their homes through eviction and foreclosure. But this year, as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and the severe economic downturn it spurred, we anticipate that number to be magnitudes greater. An Aspen Institute report released in August predicts that 30 to 40 million people are at risk of being evicted by the end of 2020, to say nothing of foreclosures.

As we write, more than a quarter of Americans and 43 percent of renting families have reported that they cannot pay their rent or mortgage. This, combined with 51 percent of U.S. households reporting that at least one person in their household has lost employment income due to COVID-19, does not bode well for the millions of already struggling households. In 2019, the Global Property Rights Index found that 13 percent of Americans were housing insecure. Looking at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Housing Pulse Survey, we know that housing insecurity has roughly doubled this year—a staggering increase.

In many cities, although evictions continue to occur, the tsunami of housing loss has not yet begun. But soaring unemployment figures, coupled with quickly depleted rental assistance programs, sharp increases in food pantry requests, and tenants taking on financial risk to pay the rent, tell us it’s coming. On September 1 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced a ban on evictions for nonpayment of rent in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The order is effective through December, and serves to delay housing loss through the end of this year, but there is no support for tenants to pay back rent, and no mention of what happens on January 1.

Forced displacements are intensely traumatic—financially, physically, and emotionally. Children have to switch schools, parents lose their jobs, families’ possessions end up on the sidewalk, and depression, anxiety, and suicide rates spike.

Yet even as our nation braces for a flood of housing loss, we know very little about these life-changing events. What is the actual rate of displacement? Where is displacement most acute? Who is most at risk? And why do people lose their homes?

Over the past year, the Future of Property Rights program and our research partners have attempted to answer these questions by visualizing the scale and breadth of housing instability and displacement across the United States, and telling the stories of communities impacted by these losses. We developed a National Housing Loss Index, which ranks U.S. counties based on their combined eviction and foreclosure rates between 2014 and 2016. In addition to analyzing county-level displacement across the United States, we examined census tract-level housing loss between 2014 and 2018 across three case study locations: Forsyth County, North Carolina (Winston-Salem); Marion County, Indiana (Indianapolis); and Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa).

We found that the United States has an acute housing loss problem. The pandemic has exacerbated the effects of stagnant wages, the lack of affordable housing, insufficient federal housing assistance, and discriminatory policies that contribute to housing loss. And while emergency measures like eviction and foreclosure moratoriums will prevent many from losing housing in the near term, they will not address the systemic policies and economic factors that lead people to lose their homes.

The pandemic may have shone a light on the rot in American housing, but that rot was there all along.

So how does studying past housing loss help us combat the current crisis?

First, we know that housing loss—both evictions and foreclosures—persistently affect the same areas, and the same communities. While shock events like the 2008 financial crisis and the current COVID-19 pandemic add to the volume of housing loss, these surges often follow familiar patterns: The people and places most vulnerable to housing loss to begin with are often the ones who experience it most acutely in times of crisis. By identifying and examining which places have traditionally experienced the most acute housing loss, we can predict where future housing loss will occur and who will be impacted, and direct resources to prevent the harm before it proliferates.

Second, knowing past housing loss at the local level gives us a baseline from which to assess the magnitude of the current problem, and to understand which areas are being disproportionately impacted. At a national level, we already have pre-pandemic data about housing insecurity. In 2019 the Global Property Rights Index, in partnership with the Gallup World Poll, found that 13 percent of Americans are housing insecure. Through the U.S. Census Bureau’s Housing Pulse Survey, we know that number has roughly doubled this year—a staggering increase. But we have no such comparison at the local level.

Third, examining the drivers of past housing loss gives us the opportunity to develop a long-term plan to redress housing precarity. Our data reveals that even before 2020, the United States’s flawed housing system disadvantaged significant parts of the population. Without intervention, the current crisis will dramatically exacerbate these pre-existing conditions. While today’s emergency certainly demands a rapid response of moratoria paired with significant cash infusions, these solutions are stopgap measures and will not address the root causes of housing instability. Rather, they provide the opportunity to pause housing displacement, so that we may finally implement more lasting solutions that make quality housing more affordable and accessible, and ensure that all Americans are afforded the fundamental human right to adequate housing.