Introduction: Why the Sun Belt and Why Now?

The U.S. Sun Belt—broadly defined as the Southern swath of the country—is growing rapidly. Researchers at Rice University found that large Sun Belt metro areas accounted for almost half of all population growth in the entire United States between 2010 and 2016. Sun Belt cities are also increasingly diverse compared to the rest of the country, in all senses of the word: race and ethnicity, age of residents, socioeconomic strata, and the types of jobs added to the local economy.

Unsurprisingly, these rapid changes are leading to some growing pains. In particular, housing affordability has declined across the Sun Belt, and housing insecurity has increased.

The Sun Belt used to be known for its housing affordability. But over the last 20 years, Rice University found that housing prices in the Sun Belt have been rising rapidly. As a consequence, homeownership has been falling at some of the fastest rates in the country, and now, Sun Belt metro areas account for six of the 10 large metros with the highest share of severely cost-burdened households (i.e., owners and renters paying more than 50 percent of their income on housing). In fact, New America found that the Sun Belt has the highest combined eviction and foreclosure rates in the country, driven by Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

The economic impacts of COVID-19 have hit the Sun Belt hard, exacerbating existing housing pressures. Sun Belt cities are often vacation destinations, and as travel dried up in 2020, these cities experienced large labor contractions and high unemployment rates.

Thanks to a patchwork of federal, state, and local moratoriums, eviction and foreclosure rates in 2020 remained low compared to prior years, even as more than one-third of Americans say they have fallen behind on their rent or mortgage. Once these moratoriums lift, tens of millions of Americans will likely lose their homes without intervention. But if the wave of evictions and foreclosures has not started yet, how do we know who is most at risk?

This is where the Displaced in the Sun Belt research may prove most useful. We know that evictions and foreclosures persistently affect the same communities, and that the people and places most vulnerable to housing loss before an economic crisis are often the ones who experience displacement most acutely during harder times. By identifying and examining which places experienced the most acute housing loss just before the pandemic, we can better predict where future housing loss will occur as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and who will be impacted, allowing decision-makers to direct resources and prevent harm before it proliferates.

The Displaced in the Sun Belt report visualizes which neighborhoods across seven locations experienced acute evictions and foreclosures just before the pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, and analyzes the groups most at risk for housing loss. The report pairs these findings with local interviews of front-line housing advocates, conducted in the fall of 2020, to understand how housing loss is changing during the pandemic.

We believe that the combination of these analyses provides clues about where housing loss will be most acute once moratoriums lift, and who will be most impacted. We hope this analysis is useful to local policymakers and advocates as they race to distribute housing aid and keep families in their homes.