Faced with rising housing costs and a multi-year influx of higher-income residents, Austin, Texas is training specialists to help residents at risk of losing their homes navigate the paperwork to access city resources that can help them stay put.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, a nonprofit helps low-income residents purchase homes through a local community land trust. In Philadelphia, volunteers make badly needed repairs, giving homes a free facelift along with structural fixes, so residents have a safe place to live.

And across the U.S., 60 cities have right-to-counsel laws, so tenants have a right to legal representation in housing court cases against landlords.

Each of these are examples of policies aimed at preventing displacement, a term for what happens when people have to leave their homes because rents or property taxes get too high, they can’t afford repairs, or other reasons.

A recent literature review in the Journal of Planning Literature takes a close look at what the research says about housing policy solutions that work to prevent displacement — and identifies areas where more research is critically needed.

The paper, “The Role of Local Housing Policies in Preventing Displacement: A Literature Review,” brings together results from academic studies, white papers from think tanks, and news stories on 12 strategies states and local governments have implemented across three broad frameworks:

• Producing new housing.
• Preserving existing housing.
• Stabilizing the finances of at-risk tenants and homeowners.

Stabilization strategies

Overall, the literature suggests strategies that focus on residents themselves are best at quickly and directly helping residents avoid displacement.  

These include programs that help residents understand legal services and advice available from municipalities or nonprofit groups, as well as programs that provide money to people stave off eviction.

But Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and one of the paper’s authors, stresses that a mix of short- and long-term strategies are needed, and whether proposed policies prevent displacement depends on local market conditions.

“In the end, it depends on what context you’re working in,” says Chapple. “Some of the things that do seem to help are, for instance, tenant counseling programs. They seem to keep people in place. And also, small amounts of cash assistance seem to help prevent people from being evicted.”

Studies cited in the paper from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit think tank, find foreclosure assistance programs, which provide counseling and sometimes financial support, can keep people in their homes. One study finds half of households in a Washington, D.C. mortgage counseling program were able to catch up on their payments or obtain a forbearance.

Production strategies

Production strategies focus on encouraging builders to construct homes to be sold at either market rate or as affordable housing. The idea is that increasing housing supply to meet the amount of housing demanded will bring down prices.

One common production strategy is inclusionary zoning, which usually requires builders to set aside a percentage of new housing units for low- or middle-income buyers, though inclusionary zoning is sometimes voluntary. Another strategy involves municipalities charging developers linkage fees — a fee per square foot of new market-rate housing — then using those funds to build affordable housing.

After reviewing the research on production strategies, the authors write that new market rate homes “may actually result in rent increases in lower priced residential buildings nearby and may not alleviate displacement over the long-term as low-income newcomers cannot move in.”

Inclusionary zoning — which has existed in California cities since the 1980s and more recently in other cities, such as Washington, D.C. — does produce affordable housing units, but the authors note “the extent of their effectiveness depends on the presence of a strong market and the particular terms of each program,” such as whether they are voluntary or mandatory.

Linkage fees raise the price of construction and raise the final price of the housing sold. Still, this strategy can provide much needed municipal funding toward affordable housing. In Boston since 2014, for example, $30 million in revenue from linkage fees has led to more than 1,250 affordable housing units being built.

Preservation strategies

Preservation strategies — those aimed at maintaining or increasing affordable housing stock — include community land trusts. This model usually starts with a nonprofit that owns and cares for a piece of land and makes long-term leases for houses built on it.

One study the authors cite finds strong evidence that this model decreases the odds of that a neighborhood will be gentrified by 70%. But other survey research suggests that community land trusts tend to serve middle-income households, rather than lower-income ones. 

“While these policies have not yet been broadly replicated and do not currently cover people at all income levels, they have the potential to work in concert with other anti-displacement strategies to preserve affordable housing and reduce displacement,” the authors write.

Another preservation strategy is the use of condo conversion restrictions, which put a yearly cap on the number of rental units in a multifamily building that an owner can convert to condos. Measures that give tenants the first right to buy their unit if it is converted can help some renters become homeowners, the authors write.

Overall, the research suggests that the most effective way for local governments to help prevent displacement is through a mix of long-term housing production and shorter-term measures to keep people in their homes.

“What seems pretty clear is that you want to make sure you have your tenant protections and housing preservation policies in place first and then do some building,” Chapple says. “We should have learned that years ago from urban renewal programs. But it’s taken a long time for people to figure that out.”

There is sparse research on housing compared with other major public policy areas, such as health care, Chapple says. Much of the research is descriptive and difficult to generalize. For example, surveys that ask about residents’ housing situations may be informative about a particular place and time, but they are difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from. There should be more research on housing stability in small metropolitan and rural areas, as well as barriers to displacement policy implementation, the authors write.

“Housing policy affects so many lives, and so many people care about it and so many people organize around it,” Chapple says. “But we don’t have evaluations like we have of health policy. We have a pretty good sense of, like, vaccines — what works? What doesn’t work, and for what stage of life? … There’s nothing like that for housing.”

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In a comprehensive analysis published last year, Tim Henderson of Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline news service crunched property numbers from data firm CoreLogic and found nearly a quarter of all single-family homes sold in the U.S. in 2021 were bought by investors. This was up from about 15% annually since 2012.

If you are reporting on housing in the U.S., you will want to inform your reporting with insights from the peer-reviewed research summarized below. The findings are nuanced.

For example, when institutional investors buy in a neighborhood, they may displace long-term residents, according to the research. But the presence of institutional investors may also improve neighborhood quality by fixing up run-down homes and investing in infrastructure, such as streetlights.

Keep reading for more insights and to understand the history behind the rise of this market.

Do Wall Street Landlords Undermine Renters’ Welfare?
Umit Gurun, Jiabin Wu, Steven Chong Xiao and Serena Wenjing Xiao. The Review of Financial Studies, January 2023.

The study: The authors use detailed 2016 data on property ownership, rental payments and crime reports by U.S. Census tract to analyze changes in rent costs and quality of life outcomes in neighborhoods where institutional investors that own single-family homes acquire one another. The data cover states across the South, Southwest and West, including Arizona, California, Florida and Texas.

Acquisitions may decrease competition — if there are two institutional investors in a neighborhood and that number drops to one because of a merger, rents will likely rise.

But acquisitions may also improve economies of scale — buying in bulk, essentially. Institutional investors may be able to make quality-of-life improvements across a large number of properties more inexpensively than if those properties were individually owned. For example, one institutional investor in the sample, “installs home automation systems in its properties that allow renters to control door locks remotely and monitor activities within the homes,” the authors write.

The findings: Across neighborhoods where there was an acquisition that netted five or more properties for the acquiring firm, average rents increased 5.2% while crime reports to law enforcement decreased 5.5% for the following year. The authors also observe more job postings for local security guards in the year after an acquisition, while streetlight radiance, referring to streetlight brightness, also increases. Eviction rates in those neighborhoods affected by an acquisition that netted five or more properties also increased, by 4.4%.

In the authors’ words: “Our study provides a more nuanced view of the effect of large institutional landlords on renters’ welfare in the postcrisis U.S. neighborhoods: institutional landlords leverage market power to extract greater surplus from renters, while improving the quality of rental services by enhancing neighborhood safety.”

How and Why U.S. Single-Family Housing Became an Investor Asset Class
Brett Christophers. Journal of Urban History, July 2021.

The study: The author explores historical evidence of why institutional investors purchased single-family homes after the Great Recession ended in 2009. The paper particularly focuses on Blackstone, an asset management firm that seeks to invest in ways that maximize returns for clients, including pension funds and wealthy people.

The findings: In a March 2009 letter to shareholders, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman “spoke effusively about the investment opportunities the group was at the time eyeing, in the midst of deepening national and global recession. Among the most attractive opportunities, he said, were in real estate, and especially urban residential real estate,” the author writes. Blackstone and other institutional investors, such as Colony Capital, would go on to heavily invest in housing over the early part of the 2010s.

At the peak of this investment activity, October 2012, 20% of home sales were made by investors. By 2016, Blackstone had acquired nearly 50,000 homes under the name Invitation Homes, and acquired another 30,000 homes in 2017 when it merged with Starwood Waypoint — one of the large mergers analyzed in the previous paper, “Do Wall Street Landlords Undermine Renters’ Welfare?” The other large firm at the time, American Homes 4 Rent, controlled 50,000 properties. “No other entity owned more than 25,000,” Christophers writes.

By 2019, Blackstone had sold its stake in Invitation Homes, which still exists as a publicly traded company. Blackstone exited the single-family home market having profited roughly $3.5 billion.

In the author’s words: “Blackstone and other large investors began buying single-family homes in the context of a transformed ideological milieu, in which it was no longer widely believed that all American families could or should be homeowners … there can be little doubt that this shift combined with those in technology, finance, and housing supply to make the ‘unprecedented’ investment opportunity that was distressed single-family housing considerably more compelling, its logic more unanswerable, than it would otherwise have been.”

Gentrifying Atlanta: Investor Purchases of Rental Housing, Evictions, and the Displacement of Black Residents
Elora Lee Raymond, Ben Miller, Michaela McKinney and Jonathan Braun. Housing Policy Debate, April 2021.

The study: The study focuses on investor-owned apartments, rather than single-family homes, but is instructive as to what happens demographically in neighborhoods when large numbers of dwellings are owned by investors. In an analysis based on eviction data and nearly 9,000 apartment sales from 2000 to 2016, the authors explore whether the rise of investor-owners in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, was associated with evictions of Black residents there — and, whether those evictions led to changes in the racial makeup of neighborhoods.

The findings: Eviction filings hovered around 40,000 per year, but eviction judgments, in which a court forces a renter to leave their apartment, rose 8% per year from 2006 to 2016. Evictions were also “much higher in predominately Black neighborhoods in south Atlanta and south Fulton County,” the authors write. They specifically associate an investor multifamily building purchase with 33% higher odds of a neighborhood experiencing a spike in evictions within a year of the transaction.

The authors define an “eviction spike” as a year in which eviction judgments occur at a one-quarter higher rate than the 200o-to-2016 average. The authors also compare demographically similar neighborhoods with or without an investor purchase. The nearly 800 blocks studied had an average of 1,635 residents. Those neighborhoods with at least one investor purchase had an average of 166 fewer Black residents and 109 more white residents over the six years after the transaction.

In the authors’ words: “Cities, community advocates, and policymakers wishing to create early warning systems to predict displacement should focus on real estate transaction data such as sales, evictions, foreclosures, and rising prices, rather than relying extensively on census data regarding demographic transition. In addition to measuring events that provide an early warning of displacement pressures, real estate data can be obtained in real time.”

Buy-to-Rent Investors and the Market for Single-Family Homes
Walter D’Lima and Paul Schultz. The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, September 2020.

The study: What happens to overall home prices in an area where investors focus their purchasing? The authors seek to answer this question using data on more than 100,000 single-family home transactions by eight major buy-to-rent investors from 2000 to 2015 across seven states that saw large upswings in investor purchases following the Great Recession: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina and Nevada.

The findings: Single-family home investors who intended to rent those homes tended to cluster in areas where home prices fell sharply following the late-2000s recession. The authors find single-family homes within a quarter mile of an investor purchase saw their home values increase within the next year by 10.5% more than properties 50 to 75 miles away, and 3.4% more than properties 5 to 10 miles away.

In other words, individual homeowners who were able to keep their homes saw their home values rebound more quickly in neighborhoods where institutional investors were active. One minor reason the authors offer is that if an investor purchases a foreclosed property, they are going to get the home fixed up and rented as soon as possible. And a maintained home with people living in it is better for other nearby property values than a vacant home falling into disrepair.

Another reason is that these investors intended to rent their properties, meaning they were no longer available for sale. This reduced the supply of buyable houses in an area, driving up prices.

In the authors’ words: “Prospectuses and company press releases suggest that all of these buy-to-rent investors have a similar business model … They typically spend $20,000 to $25,000 to renovate properties before renting them out. They attempt to take advantage of economies of scale by purchasing large numbers of houses in a metropolitan area. Buy-to-rent investors prefer to rent to middle class families. Their preferred purchase is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in a good school district. All of these buy-to-rent investors entered real estate markets at about the same time.”

Capitalizing on Collapse: An Analysis of Institutional Single-Family Rental Investors
Gregg Colburn, Rebecca Walter and Deirdre Pfeiffer. Urban Affairs Review, May 2020.

The study: While the demographic and financial effects of institutional investing in single-family homes has been recently well-documented, the strategies these investors use are less known. The authors examine firms’ prospectuses and corporate filings to understand how these investors do business.

The findings: The market for single-family rentals owned by institutional investors grew rapidly in the first half of the 2010s, from 40,000 such homes in 2012 to almost 120,000 homes by 2014, the authors write. Single-family home prices recovered over the next few years, and faced with more competition from individual home buyers, institutional investors gained only another 40,000 homes by 2018.

Investors tend to target cities with the potential for job growth, strong demand for rentals, and low overall housing supply compared with demand. Firms use technology such as mobile and web apps, rather than personal interactions, to collect rent, assess fees and choose tenants with strong credit ratings and steady household incomes. Mergers and acquisitions among the initial firms in the market mean remaining firms take advantage of economies of scale, reducing operating costs and increasing profits.

In the authors’ words: “The increasing participation of institutional investors raises broader concerns about competition for moderately priced single-family housing that is becoming increasingly scarce. As the homeownership rate increases and mortgage markets normalize, a growing number of households want to purchase single-family homes. But individual households seeking to purchase relatively low-priced single-family homes now face potential competition from well-capitalized firms that want to acquire the same properties.”

Further reading

An Antitrust Framework for Housing
Renee Tapp and Richard Peiser. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, November 2022.

Real Estate Investors and the U.S. Housing Recovery
Lauren Lambie-Hanson, Wenli Li and Michael Slonkosky. Real Estate Economics, June 2022.

Gentrifying Atlanta: Investor Purchases of Rental Housing, Evictions, and the Displacement of Black Residents
Elora Lee Raymond, Ben Miller, Michaela McKinney and Jonathan Braun. Housing Policy Debate, April 2021.

The Financialization of Single-Family Rental Housing: An Examination of Real Estate Investment Trusts’ Ownership of Single-Family Houses in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area
Suzanne Lanyi Charles. Journal of Urban Affairs, October 2019.

Institutional Investment, Asset Illiquidity and Post-Crash Housing Market Dynamics
Patrick Smith and Crocker Liu. Real Estate Economics, November 2017.

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About 60% of U.S. homeowners have a mortgage and most have a mortgage that lasts 30 years with a fixed interest rate. Monthly payments to the bank do not change over the life of those loans.

The U.S. is “the only country in the world in which the 30-year fixed rate residential mortgage is the dominant home mortgage product,” writes Lehigh University professor of finance Richard Kish in a February 2022 paper in the Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education.

Another type of home loan, called an adjustable-rate mortgage, is more common in other advanced economies, such as some European Union countries. These loans have also resurged in the U.S. as rates rise on 30-year fixed loans.

Compared with fixed-rate loans, adjustable loans often have lower rates to start, with rates subject to change in later years. For a homeowner these loans are a bet that their financial future will be bright, or that they will be able to sell before the adjustable-rate period kicks in. They are also attractive in certain economic environments, like the current one, with initial adjustable rates significantly lower than 30-year fixed rates.

Lenders offer adjustable-rate mortgages because they can potentially earn more interest for decades. For borrowers, if monthly payments rise and a homeowner can’t pay, that could mean less spending on other items or even foreclosure.

From early 2020 through early 2022, adjustable-rate loans made up less than 5% of all mortgage applications, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, a nonprofit organization representing the U.S. mortgage finance industry.

But by mid-2022, they made up more than 10% of mortgage applications, a level unseen in over a decade. For the last full week of October, nearly 12% of mortgage applications were for adjustable-rate loans. The last time they were notably popular was during the run-up to the housing collapse that sparked the Great Recession of the late 2000s. Adjustable-rate mortgages made up over a third of mortgage applications each year from 2004 to 2007 before plummeting to less than 5% across parts of 2008 and 2009, and remaining under 10% until recently.

Given the uptick in adjustable-rate mortgages, and ongoing rate hikes from the U.S. Federal Reserve, it is important that journalists understand how they work and what the research says about them, including ways the mortgage market has become more heavily regulated since the late 2000s.

How do adjustable-rate mortgages work?

Homeowners with an adjustable-rate mortgage get a lower fixed rate, for a period of time, in exchange for a variable rate later on. The application process is similar for fixed-rate and adjustable mortgages, with lenders assessing applicants’ creditworthiness and ability to make payments.

The fixed-rate period for an adjustable-rate mortgage is usually five, seven or 10 years. One common adjustable-rate mortgage is called a 5/1. The five refers to the number of fixed-interest years; the one refers to how often the rate may change — once a year — after the fixed period expires. Other adjustable-rate mortgages, such as 7/1 and 10/1, follow the same pattern. For another type of adjustable-rate mortgage, called a 5/6, the fixed term is five years with the rate adjusting every six months.

Most adjustable-rate mortgages last 30 years, meaning for a 5/1 mortgage the borrower would have variable rates for 25 years. These borrowers might expect to earn enough by then to cover a monthly payment hike, or that they will be able to sell their home or refinance before the fixed term expires.

With average 30-year fixed rates historically low over the past three years — between 2.5% and 3.5% — the difference between those rates and adjustable rates was practically nil. Adjustable-rate applications were low because borrowers didn’t think it was worth the risk of potentially higher rates later for the benefit of shaving a tenth of a percentage point during the fixed term.

Today, the fixed period for an adjustable rate mortgage is one percentage point lower on average than a 30-year fixed-rate. An average 30-year fixed rate mortgage now comes with almost a 7% yearly interest rate. A 5/1 comes with 6% interest for the fixed term, according to a regularly conducted survey of lenders. A percentage point might mean hundreds of dollars of savings each month. This is the reason for renewed interest in adjustable-rate loans. Still, at 6%, the average rate for the fixed period of an adjustable loan is up about 3.5 percentage points from the start of 2022.

When choosing a mortgage, borrowers are making a decision that could have beneficial or disastrous consequences for their financial future. Research can help clarify how borrowers make those decisions. In a 2010 paper exploring the then-recent plunge in adjustable-rate mortgages, economists for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York note that in “the view of some analysts, households are largely myopic. They choose between adjustable-rate and fixed-rate mortgages simply by comparing the initial interest rates they would have to pay on the two contracts.”

After analyzing a large dataset of mortgage originations, the authors suggest that the mortgage decisions are not myopic but more closely linked to the difference between 30-year-fixed mortgage rates and recent average adjustable-mortgage rates. Put another way, borrowers don’t just look at the initial interest rates, they also consider what their adjustable rate might be longer-term.

Banks cannot raise interest rates as much as they want during adjustment periods. Maximum increases are spelled out in loan documents, so borrowers have a sense of how much they might be paying down the road. There are other safeguards, such as lifetime adjustment caps, which are usually 5%, and yearly increases, which are capped differently depending on the length of the fixed period.

Adjustable rates are based on the sum of two things: the index and the margin.

An index acts as a barometer of overall economic conditions. The index rate changes with market conditions. Different lenders tie these rates to different indexes. Changes to the index rate primarily affect how monthly payments change.

U.S. Treasury Department security yields are one common index. As the yield, or interest rate, rises or falls on Treasury securities — such as bonds — so goes the rate on an adjustable loan. Federal Reserve interest rates affect indexes, which is why when central bankers hike rates people with variable mortgages will probably see their monthly payments increase next time their payments are adjusted.

The margin refers to percentage points the lender adds in addition to the index rate. Margins vary by lender, but they hold steady during the life of the loan. The average margin has been around 2.75 percentage points on a 5/1 loan since 2005, which is as far back as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation has tracked that data.

Adjustable rates do not always increase. A borrower taking out a loan today could be betting that when it comes time for the fixed-rate period to end, index rates will be lower than they are now. In April 2010, 5/1 mortgages were about 1 percentage point lower than 30-year fixed mortgages. Five years later, with Federal Reserve rates hovering around 0%, those 5/1 mortgage holders would have seen their monthly payments fall. Given the Federal Reserve hikes over the past half-year, they will have seen monthly payments increase.

Are adjustable-rate mortgages risky?

News outlets often portray adjustable-rate mortgages as riskier than fixed-rate mortgages — and that is true by definition. It’s also worth noting in news stories that adjustable-rate mortgage holders are not locked in forever. Homeowners with an adjustable-rate mortgage can refinance, or switch, to a fixed-rate mortgage at any time if they qualify. The catch, as with any mortgage refinancing, is that the borrower has to pay closing costs, which can amount to thousands of dollars.

Also, adjustable-rate mortgages today are different from what they were during the Great Recession.

In 2006, during the lead-up to the housing market collapse that preceded that recession, some 90% of subprime mortgages featured an interest rate that was subject to change over the life of the loan, according to an August 2022 paper in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management. Subprime mortgages were mortgages lenders made to borrowers with low credit scores, who put down low down payments, had bankruptcies or other factors indicating they might be a risk to default.

Some adjustable-rate mortgages during the mid-2000s had shorter fixed-rate periods, meaning borrowers would face variable rates in 1 or 2 years, rather than five or more years. For some loans, borrowers only “needed only to show proof of money in their bank accounts,” while other lenders offered loans that “eliminated the need to prove or even to state any owned assets,” write the authors of the 2022 paper.

Before the Great Recession, adjustable-rate mortgage holders were “more likely to have been turned down for credit in the past five years, hardly ever pay off their credit card balances in full and utilize a higher share of credit card limits,” write the authors of a 2013 study in the journal Real Estate Economics. The authors of a U.S. Government Accountability Office report from 2010 find “loans that lacked full documentation of borrower income and assets were associated with increased default probabilities, and the influence of borrowers’ reported income varied with the level of documentation.”

More recent research also suggests higher adjustable interest rates historically track with more foreclosures. Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at New York University, analyzes foreclosures covering 40% of the mortgage market from 2000 to 2010 in a 2019 paper in The Journal of Finance. Gupta finds a “1 percentage point increase in [an] interest rate at the time of adjustable-rate mortgage reset results in a 2.5 percentage increase in the probability of foreclosure in the following year.”

Federal rules and legislation passed after the Great Recession make a housing market collapse less likely today. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which became law in July 2010, is the most notable. It was written and shepherded by then-Senator Chris Dodd and then-Representative Barney Frank. The law introduced new oversight to nearly every corner of the financial industry.

Again, from the 2022 paper in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management:

“The Dodd-Frank Act, which is the most significant and comprehensive of all legislation, significantly lowers the risk on mortgage products by eliminating the no down payment loan option while tightening the underwriting criteria for mortgages based on the borrowers’ ability to pay; it also places various layers of legal responsibility on the lender, which includes comprehensive disclosure about the loan enabling the borrower to understand the major terms of the mortgage.”

The authors note that the Federal Reserve also requires banks to be better capitalized, in order to better withstand economic shocks. That means banks now have to have more cash on hand compared with their outstanding loans. Other federal disclosure requirements and notifications specific to adjustable-rate mortgages, like providing borrowers rate increase scenarios, have gone into effect in recent years.

Aside from the collapse of the U.S. housing market, current disclosure and reporting requirements exist for a reason: Research from 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics found that “borrowers with adjustable-rate mortgages appear likely to underestimate or to not know how much their interest rates could change.”

Requirements on what lenders need to tell borrowers can change as political headwinds shift. Federal law from May 2018 rolled back parts of Dodd-Frank meant to protect minority mortgage applicants. In October 2022, a federal judge overturned a Trump-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule exempting some small banks from reporting requirements aimed at ensuring equitable access to home loans.

Regulatory guardrails are designed to prevent a total housing market meltdown, but journalists should keep the recent spate of adjustable-rate mortgages in mind when covering the topic now and in a few years, when fixed-rate periods end.

Monthly mortgage payments that suddenly spike can affect communities by way of deferred home maintenance and lower property values. A study from 2016 in Urban Affairs Review examines residential property sales in Milwaukee from 2002 to 2013 and finds each tax delinquent property is associated with nearby home prices falling by more than $1,000.

Research to know

The COVID-19 Housing Boom: Is a 2007–2009-Type Crisis on the Horizon?
Diamando Afxentiou, Peter Harris and Paul Kutasovic. August 2022, Journal of Risk and Financial Management.

Household Mortgage Refinancing Decisions are Neighbor Influenced, Especially along Racial Lines
W. Ben McCartney and Avni Shah. March 2022, Journal of Urban Economics.

The Dominance of the U.S. 30-Year Fixed Rate Residential Mortgage
Richard Kish. February 2022, Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education.

Mortgage Refinance Costs and a Better Adjustable-Rate Mortgage Contract
Borys Grochulski. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, November 2021.

Forced moves and home maintenance: The amplifying effects of mortgage payment burden on underwater homeowners
John Harding, Jing Li, Stuart Rosenthal and Xirui Zhang. Real Estate Economics, August 2021.

Foreclosure Contagion and the Neighborhood Spillover Effects of Mortgage Defaults
Arpit Gupta. May 2019, The Journal of Finance.

Fixed-Rate Mortgages, Labor Markets, and Efficiency
Kangoh Lee. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, August 2018.

What Calls to ARMs? International Evidence on Interest Rates and the Choice of Adjustable-Rate Mortgages
Cristian Badarinza, John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai. Management Science, February 2017.

Assessing the Influence of Property Tax Delinquency and Foreclosures on Residential Property Sales
Deborah Carroll and Christopher Goodman. November 2016, Urban Affairs Review.

Why is the Market Share of Adjustable-Rate Mortgages So Low?
Emanuel Moench, James Vickery, and Diego Aragon. December 2010, Current Issues in Economics and Finance.

Do Borrowers Know Their Mortgage Terms?
Brian Bucks and Karen Pence. September 2008, Journal of Urban Economics.

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The shortage of housing in the U.S. has been documented by journalists and researchers alike. In simple economic terms, the housing crisis boils down to not enough affordable housing to meet the demand.

Freddie Mac, a federally chartered mortgage lender, estimates an overall national shortage of nearly 4 million housing units, mostly because of a lack of single family starter homes, with the overall housing deficit increasing by 52% from 2018 to 2020.

But there is a middle ground between owning and renting that could provide relief: community land trusts. The widespread viability of community land trusts has been largely unexplored in the news media.

There are more than 225 community land trusts in the U.S. Under the typical model, a nonprofit entity owns and cares for the land with homeowners leasing their properties for a long time, usually 99 years. Residents cannot individually own the land beneath their home, but they can own the structure itself. The structures are usually houses, not mobile homes. Decisions on how the land is used and maintained are made through democratic processes, and homeowners usually have the right to bequeath their lease.  

A new paper, “Interrupting Inequality through Community Land Trusts,” in the journal Housing Policy Debate, surveys how community land trust homeowners perceive their housing situation, with insights from hundreds of individuals indicating that the community land trust model puts people who might otherwise be renting in a more stable housing situation. A few of the findings:

• Community land trust homeowners report a better overall quality of life than renters, as measured by long-term housing stability, household financial hardship, and other factors.
• Among renters, traditional homeowners and community land trust homeowners, land trust owners had the lowest monthly housing payment — $50 less on average than homeowners who bought at market rates.
• Community land trust homeowners are more likely to be Black and in female-led households than renters and market-rate homeowners.

While the survey is not large at about 500 participants, it is the first to compare the experiences of people from similar economic backgrounds who are homeowners in a community land trust, homeowners who bought at market rates, and renters.

Community land trust origins

The community land trust model traces back to the civil rights era. Civil rights activists Charles and Shirley Sherrod established the first community land trust, New Communities Inc., in 1969 across 5,735 acres in Lee County, Georgia, “to continue the fight against segregated schools, segregated housing, and other vestiges of Jim Crow,” as housing policy scholar John Emmeus Davis writes in a 2014 history of land trusts.

Community land trusts are often funded through private, federal and local government grants. New land trusts have recently launched in Blacksburg, Virginia; Detroit; Jacksonville, Florida; and New York City. Established community land trusts range in size, from the Minot Area Community Land Trust’s portfolio of 10 homes in North Dakota to the Champlain Housing Trust’s portfolio of 636 homes in northwest Vermont.

If a community land trust homeowner wants to sell their house, the land trust will use a resale formula that often accounts for appreciation and other factors. But sales prices will likely fall below what a similar market-rate property would bring. Individual profits are secondary to achieving long-term, even intergenerational stable housing.

“It seems like we always go back to homeownership as this wealth-building tool,” says Jakob Schneider, an environmental psychology doctoral student at the City University of New York Graduate Center and one of the authors of the new paper. “That has come under question in recent years, if not decades. We’re seeing a fair amount of research talking about how it’s really hard for a lot of folks, not just lower income people or people of color to get into homeownership, but people who don’t have access to intergenerational wealth, they don’t have parents that can help with a down payment.”

Late last year, nearly half of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said housing affordability was “a major problem where they live.” The National Association of Realtors’ Housing Shortage Tracker identifies most urban areas of the country as having a housing shortage relative to the number of new jobs being created.

In its 2022 “State of the Nation’s Housing” report, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University relays that even with more apartments going up and higher interest rates relieving competition for home buyers, for “lower-income households and households of color … the pressure of high housing costs is unlikely to relent.”

Similar outcomes for community land trust and traditional homeowners

The findings published in Housing Policy Debate are based on a survey conducted in May 2018 with 216 community land trust homeowners, 142 market-rate homeowners and 130 renters, all of whom lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota or Portland, Oregon.

The average annual household income among the three participant groups ranged from nearly $38,000 to just over $42,000. The average monthly housing payment for community land trust homeowners was lowest at $772; renters paid $810, on average, monthly while homeowners who bought at market rates paid a monthly average of $822.

The survey explored these outcomes for community land trust households:

• Financial health
• Housing stability
• Overall quality of life

Participants who were community land trust homeowners were about evenly split between Portland and Minneapolis. About 66% of the market-rate owners and nearly 91% of renters were in Portland.

Community land trust homeowners who took the survey were more likely to be “older, Black and in female-headed households,” the authors write.

“These data suggest that [community land trusts] are serving their targeted populations of women, single-headed households, and minorities,” they add.

Renters were much more likely than community land trust homeowners to report having moved recently, along with less overall housing stability, more financial hardship, less time to pursue their goals, and less of a feeling that their house was a home — for example, that they were free to make alterations in and on their house or apartment. All those findings were statistically significant.

Market rate and community land trust homeowners reported similar levels of financial hardship, housing stability and feeling that their house was a home. Market rate owners, however, reported less time to tackle other goals than did community land trust owners.

White couples who live in market rate households “may spend more time working” than community land trust owners, who “may not be as focused on making more money and instead focused more on achieving other life satisfactions,” the authors write.

The “sense of autonomy, control and responsibility” that community land trust homeowners gain in contrast to renting or other less stable housing situations contributes “to a growing reserve of confidence and belief in one’s capabilities that could then be deployed in pursuit of grander, more challenging goals,” according to a paper published in March 2018 in the journal Housing Studies, based on interviews with 91 community land trust homeowners in Minneapolis.

Community land trusts are unlikely to be a cure-all for the housing crisis. As Schneider points out, they require time, energy and dedication to launch and maintain. At the same time, they have worked well to establish housing stability in a variety of communities, both urban and rural, across the country.

“These are things that take decades to really solidify,” Schneider says. “For me, it’s just another piece of the puzzle that can help keep folks that might otherwise be in unstable housing conditions, or, in some instances, being pushed out of neighborhoods that they’ve lived in for generations, as a way to potentially keep them there.”

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In the opening lines of their multiyear “Wires and Fires” investigation, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Raquel Rutledge, John Diedrich and Daphne Chen explain that fires caused by an inanimate force — electricity — discriminate by ZIP code.

The story quickly moves to Patricia Colston, a mother and grandmother, and her friend Clarence Murrell. Both died in an Oct. 2019 electrical fire in a bungalow situated in the “already distressed 53206 ZIP code,” the reporters write. 53206 and the surrounding areas are the “epicenter for electrical fire danger in the city.”

Officials had done little to mitigate the electrical fire risk, the reporters explain in their Aug. 2021 story, the first in the three-part series. “The people affected the most: low-income Black renters,” they write.

Opening their investigation with a description of electricity coursing through wires in residential walls — “out of sight” and “hardly noticed,” taken for granted, “unless it jumps off course, escaping through a frayed wire, loose connection or overheated outlet” — was a conscious, deliberative choice.

“We really felt as we got into this that the electricity could be a character,” Diedrich says. “It could be a tutorial moment for our readers and really for us. The reporting that went into that top, it really brought Raquel and us as well to become experts.”

None of the reporters knew much about electrical wiring at the onset of the investigation. In an email to The Journalist’s Resource, Rutledge recalls diving headlong into reports from fire investigators, trade journals and primers on electricity — plus watching video tutorials and reading product manuals related to wiring, in order to achieve a baseline of relevant concepts and installation procedures.

“I wanted to understand not only how the electrons move but how homes are wired,” she explains. “And what happens, technically, when the wires and systems break down. Once I had a bit of foundation, I reached out to electrical engineers and interviewed multiple experts.”

Story origins

The investigation began the Saturday morning when a fire, likely caused by faulty wiring, killed Colston and Murrell. Diedrich covered the fire shortly after it happened.  He spoke with the families of the victims. Fire officials said it was a suspected electrical fire and would likely be ruled accidental, Diedrich recalls.

On Monday, Diedrich and Rutledge searched code violations at the property and began to examine its history of electrical violations gone unfixed. They realized the standard line from fire officials, that electrical fire equals accidental fire, meant the department didn’t further investigate those fires.

“It’s sort of the classic little brief in the paper that turns out to be a much bigger story when some digging happens behind it,” Diedrich says.

Chen joined Rutledge and Diedrich on the story in Feb. 2021 to examine a large set of federal data related to fires. Chen specializes in data analysis. The reporters consulted industry and academic experts to understand which categories of information within the dataset indicated a suspected electrical fire. Once Chen cleaned the data, she mapped it.

“It was visually obvious that this was happening on the North side of Milwaukee, which is predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Chen says. “Then we did some more data analysis, to prove that quantitatively.”

They found that renters occupied around one-third of homes in the city from 2009 to 2019. But nearly two-thirds of suspected electrical fires happened in rental units.

“And nearly two-thirds of the fires took place in ZIP codes that are predominantly Black,” the reporters write.

Providing readers with life-saving know-how

In the online presentation of the Aug. 2021 story, a map appears roughly a quarter of the way through the first article, with dozens of red dots representing the sites of electrical fires over the past decade in the 53206 ZIP code.

Then, about halfway through the article, a graphic appears showing a room with weathered green wallpaper and a framed picture hung between two sconces. Keep scrolling and the image zooms onto a wall switch with this explanation: “Sparks coming from a light switch are a sign of an incorrectly installed switch or damaged wiring.”

The graphic continues to move around the room providing readers with information on signs of potential electrical trouble: flickering lights, discolored outlet plates, outlets overloaded with power strips and wires damaged by rodents or from nails used to hang pictures.

“We knew early on that visually we would have to go above and beyond,” Chen says. “Electrical fires aren’t that dramatic looking because they often start behind walls, they’re not huge blazes necessarily.”

It’s a useful interactive graphic, placed in the middle of a compelling narrative in order to grab readers’ attention — and to educate. Diedrich says that while reporting on the problem itself was important, the team also had an “obligation” to offer pragmatic information to help people recognize electrical problems in their own homes.  

Leaning on academic and industry expertise

John Johnson, a research fellow who studies housing at Marquette University, and other academic researchers provided the investigative team with critical insights as they analyzed data and reported around Milwaukee.

“To have someone who’s willing to double check you, make sure that what you’re doing is statistically significant, that is huge,” Chen says. “Oftentimes, there is someone who, they’ve made this their life’s work. One of the experts we quoted, they call him Dr. Fire.”

The reporters document landlords the city had notified of code violations but who hadn’t fixed those problems, with some owing tens of thousands of dollars in fines. It illustrates the city government’s lack of insight into the extent of electrical issues in Milwaukee homes.

To shed some light, the reporters, along with master electrician Bruce Janczak, visited a randomly selected sample of 50 single- and two-family rentals in 53206 during the spring and summer of 2021, as a follow-up to their initial investigation. (The idea originated with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editor Sam Roe, Diedrich says.)

They offered renters a free electrical inspection, paid for through a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. “Renters in 15 units agreed to participate in the study,” allowing the electrician into their homes, the reporters write.

The electrician found electrical fire hazards in every unit but one. Johnson, the Marquette researcher, told the reporters “considering the margin of error, the study indicates at least 80% of the 3,300 single and two-family rental properties in the ZIP code studied have electrical code violations.” 

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers called the initial investigation “gut-wrenching.” The city is now considering bringing back an inspection program that had been shuttered and is launching a tenant education program about electrical safety. Several landlords who own the properties Janczak inspected said they would fix the problems right away.

In one of the stories in the series, Vytenis Babrauskas — the fire safety expert known as Dr. Fire within that research community — calls the reporters’ study of randomly inspected properties “pioneering work.”

Keep reading for tips on talking to sources about complex topics, working around official sources to obtain documents and conducting challenging interviews.

Tip 1: Ask sources, especially experts in a technical field, to explain their world as simply as possible.

If you don’t understand what a source is telling you, odds are you will be unable to convey that information clearly to your audience. Particularly when interviewing someone who has years of experience in a specialized field, like home wiring, it’s OK not to immediately grasp every concept or process they’re telling you about. If something is unclear, ask them to go back through it again.

“I frequently found myself saying ‘If you could please try to explain it to me as if I were a fifth grader, that would be great,’” Rutledge writes to The Journalist’s Resource by email. “Then I would repeat back to them my understanding in the simplest terms to confirm.”

Tip 2: Lean into the push-and-pull process of crafting a compelling narrative.

When writing an investigative series as a team, it’s not unheard of to butt heads with colleagues about the direction of the narrative.

For the “Wires and Fires” lead, Rutledge was adamant that she wanted to start by framing electricity itself as a key character in the 53206 fires. Her editor wanted to start with a more traditional lead, with three stories of electrical fires, she recalls.

Rutledge won out. She explains that she and her editor “get along well enough to have heated conversations that usually, maybe always, make our stories better in the end.”

Tip 3: Get involved with producing graphics, even if you don’t specialize in multimedia.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel senior video and multimedia producer Bill Schulz created the interactive graphic that informs readers about signs of electrical trouble in their homes. But the investigative team was involved every step of the way, from writing text to making sure the visuals matched their reporting.

“It was to the point where we were like, ‘Hey, Bill, can you make the wallpaper look a little bit older because these electrical fires usually happen in older homes,’” Chen says. “It took a lot of effort and a lot of team collaboration, but I think it was worth it just to bring this issue that can be pretty technical alive in the eyes of viewers.”

Tip 4: Work with people affected by an incident to obtain documents.

A government agency might be unwilling or unable to share official reports because of privacy laws or other reasons, but a person affected by an incident typically has the right to obtain those documents.

“When you’re trying to get documents, and they might be fire documents as they are in this case, but particularly medical documents, it’s very helpful to go with the person who is affected by it,” Diedrich says.

He adds that he helped a source affected by a fire obtain the official report. It wasn’t a quid pro quo — Diedrich’s assistance navigating the official systems to get the report wasn’t contingent on his being able to review it. But the source was willing to share.

Tip 5: Remember that even incomplete data can still be informative.

You might dream about compiling a comprehensive dataset that clearly exposes wrongdoing or systemic bias. That’s not always going to happen. But remember that some data is better than none.

For example, the reporters obtained samples of rental assistance data spanning 2018 to 2020, finding that nearly $200,000 in tax dollars went to the owners of 62 single- and two-family homes with outstanding electrical violations.

“The actual numbers are likely much higher,” they write.

Chen says that “data lives with a lot of different nonprofits and different branches of government who are all involved in distributing rent assistance. Not all of them were willing to give it to us, so we ended up with a small slice of that data. We were able to at least say, ‘Hey, based on this small slice, here’s what we can say about what’s probably happening across Milwaukee.’”

Read the stories

• Electrical Fires hit Milwaukee’s Black Renters Hardest. Nobody is Held Accountable.
• Frayed Wires. Defective Lights. Fire Traps. What we Found Doing Electrical Inspections in One Milwaukee Neighborhood.
• How Your Tax Dollars Keep Milwaukee Renters in Danger from Faulty Wiring.
• ‘It’s Gut-Wrenching’: Electrical Fires’ Impact on Black Milwaukee Renters Prompts Action by Evers and Other Officials.
• ‘Making Milwaukee a Better Place.’ Community Activists, Officials Tackle Scourge of Faulty Wiring Endangering City Renters.
• Tips for Renters to Avoid Electrical Problems: Check Outlets, Test Light Switches, Research the Property, Know Your Rights.

The post How they did it: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters show how low-income Black renters in the city face disproportionate electrical fire dangers appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

It took a lot of work to get the numbers the Federal Emergency Management Agency would not share. After Washington Post reporters Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran figured out how to scrape the data from a dormant government website — pulling 9.5 million records, 1,000 rows at a time — they discovered how badly FEMA had failed the people it was created to help.

The federal agency’s mission is to prepare the country for and respond to natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods. FEMA also oversees federal recovery efforts, including distributing funding to help communities rebuild.

But Dreier and Tran show that FEMA has denied the overwhelming majority of disaster survivors’ requests for aid in recent years. At the time the two journalists reported their findings in 2021, FEMA rejected nearly 90% of applications seeking help repairing homes, burying loved ones and covering various other costs of recovery. Even as the need for this type of assistance rose nationally, they learned that application approval rates fell from 63% in 2010 to 13% in 2021.

Throughout 2021, Dreier and Tran investigated FEMA and its work going back years. After traveling the country, conducting close to 300 interviews, submitting dozens of public record requests, analyzing thousands of documents and creating multiple databases, they published a series of stories that also showed how FEMA:

• Systematically denied assistance to Black families in the Deep South.
• Set up temporary housing for low-income families but then booted some out before they could find new homes.
• Took so long to fund mitigation projects that some communities suffered the same type of disaster before receiving money to help with the first one.
• Rejected requests for funeral assistance from people who lost loved ones at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Their “FEMA’s Disasters” series initiated change, prompting new legislation and forcing FEMA to revamp its policies, publish application approval rates, and partner with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on housing assistance and case management.

In December, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, to “design and deliver a streamlined, online disaster assistance application” and work with individual states to make it easier for people of all ability levels to apply for and receive disaster aid.

The Journalist’s Resource reached out to Dreier and Tran to ask them about their work and for tips to guide other journalists hoping to pursue similar projects. Eager to help, they offered insights and advice across a slew of subjects. Below, we share six of their tips on framing stories, gaining access to government data, interviewing and building relationships with sources, and learning how to do data journalism.

1. Assume people want to talk to journalists.

Because FEMA declined most requests for interviews and information, Dreier and Tran found other ways to get the information they needed to understand how the agency responded to disasters and requests for aid. Dreier, a national enterprise reporter at the Washington Post, traveled the country visiting ravaged communities and seeking interviews with disaster survivors and FEMA workers.

Getting strangers to talk about their personal struggles and employees to divulge information an employer does not want a news outlet to have can be quite difficult, Dreier says. But she keeps trying to reach people and interview them until they make it clear they are uninterested.

“I try to assume everybody wants to talk to me — until they tell me directly that they don’t,” says Dreier.

FEMA officials had insisted employees working at the call center for its COVID-19 funeral assistance program would not speak to her. When Dreier asked advocates for California families who lost their homes in wildfires for help contacting them, the advocates told her families did not want to talk.

They did, though. And Dreier would not have gotten those interviews had she not visited the FEMA camp in Chico, California and asked residents to share their experiences or used LinkedIn to track down close to 100 call center employees. One worker even allowed Dreier to spend the day with her as she answered phone calls seeking aid from her home office.

“I just think it’s important to keep going until you really know the person isn’t interested in talking,” Dreier says. “I flew out to California and showed up on the doorstep and they were super happy to see me. They welcomed me right in and were glad someone wanted to tell their story.”

2. Avoid covering news stories in a way that portrays members of the public as victims and government agencies as villainous. Instead, look for opportunities to show audiences that public policy problems often are more complicated than they seem.

“Don’t always look for bad guys,” says Dreier, who tried to understand the various factors influencing FEMA decisions.

She doubts agency officials acted out of malice when they denied people’s requests for assistance. But they also had not made changes after realizing certain rules prevented qualified applicants from getting aid.

Dreier, who did the bulk of the writing for the project, drew upon interviews and observations of FEMA employees to demonstrate how rules designed to help people can have unintended consequences. For instance, FEMA’s policy on which documents it accepts as proof of ownership of a property has made it impossible for some Black families to qualify for assistance rebuilding after a disaster.

More than one-third of the land Black people own in the southern U.S. “is passed down informally, rather than through deeds and wills,” Dreier and Tran write. “It’s a custom that dates to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were excluded from the Southern legal system. When land is handed down like this, it becomes heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which families hold property collectively, without clear title.”

In the second article in the series, Dreier describes how a FEMA specialist tried unsuccessfully to help Black families who had lived for generations on the same property in Alabama get money to rebuild their homes following a tornado.

“The more you can help readers get into the heads of everyone in the story, the more likely they’re going to read the story and you can get at the different complexities,” Dreier explains, adding that the second story “showed that [FEMA] workers themselves were frustrated and helped drive home the point that these policies were really problematic.”

3. Find ways to remind sources you’re not a friend — you’re a journalist doing your job. For example, take out a notebook and write in it even when you don’t need to take notes.

It’s important for sources to know that even though your reporting could benefit them and even though they may have shared personal details and spent considerable time with you, you’re not their friend.

Dreier recommends reminding sources of these things, especially sources who don’t have experience working with journalists. They must understand that anything they say and do — unless you have agreed to allow some of it to be off the record — could show up in a news story.

Two signs that sources might be confused about your role: They ask you for advice on how to handle the problem you’re reporting on, or they share information that could hurt them.

“It’s hard to initially build trust and then, once you have that trust, there’s always the worry, you don’t want them to trust you too much,” Dreier notes, adding: “There’s something about a person coming in and being so interested in the minutiae of your life that can make someone let down their guard.”

Writing in a notebook or using a voice recorder, regardless of whether you need to capture certain details or conversations, is a good way to remind people that you’re doing a job. Dreier says these visual cues “remind people not to give you access to information they’re not truly comfortable with.”

On occasion, though, she feels the need to explicitly state her relationship with a source.   

“Sometimes, I’ll just say ‘I’m not your friend,’” she says. “It’s so awkward. I think sometimes you have to do that.”

4. If you can’t get data from a government agency, check to see if it’s hidden somewhere within its website.

When Tran, a data reporter on The Washington Post’s rapid-response investigative team, first tried to look at data on how often FEMA approves applications for aid, he could not get to it. The FEMA website had provided a link to the information but the link did not work. That meant Tran had to figure out another way to access the data.

He used his programming skills to find and pull data from the FEMA website’s software interface.

“It’s rare, but you can sometimes find it stashed in a corner of a website or in the background of the website,” Tran says.

“It’s just trial and error,” he adds. “You poke around and see what access points are available.”

He found the data on FEMA’s site and he and Dreier were able to scrape, or collect, the information piecemeal — 1,000 rows at a time.

He had to reformat the data by hand so he and Dreier could compare it against census tract data to see if there were racial disparities in application approval rates. There were.

“Nationally, FEMA denies requests for help from about 2 percent of applicants for disaster aid because of title issues,” they report. “In majority-Black counties, the rate is twice as high, according to a Washington Post analysis, in large part because Black people are twice as likely to pass down property informally. But in parts of the Deep South, FEMA has rejected up to a quarter of applicants because they can’t document ownership, according to the Post analysis.”

5. To learn about data journalism, do it. Start by trying to reproduce a data project you admire.

“Get the dataset they worked with or something similar that’s relevant to your area and then redo [the project],” Tran says. “You’ll learn something along the way, especially if these journalists are putting up their methodology on GitHub.”

GitHub is a social coding site and the world’s largest repository of source code. Many news outlets put their open source projects on GitHub, which allows journalists from other newsrooms to repurpose them for their audiences.

For instance, Tran posted on GitHub the data and analysis he did for the story showing that funding for FEMA assistance projects often doesn’t reach communities until years after the disaster occurred.

If you need help, Tran suggests reaching out to data journalists you know or whose work you follow. You can also find data journalists through the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, a project of Investigative Reporters and Editors, or the News Nerdery’s Slack channels.

“The data journalism community is so welcoming and open,” he says. “You just have to find a project to apply these skills to.”

6. Take data science courses. MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins University and other top colleges offer free courses through online learning platforms such as edX and Coursera.

Tran says that’s how he learned. He completed several free online courses, including MIT’s 13-week course, “The Analytics Edge,” and an 18-hour course from Johns Hopkins University, “The Data Scientist’s Toolbox.”

He urges journalists not to let a lack of confidence in their math skills keep them from learning how to obtain and analyze datasets.

“I was horrible in math growing up — I was horrible,” he says. “Once you start getting into the habit of [analyzing data], you see the patterns and things. It’s not intimidating once you get past the first [data project].”

Tran has taught data journalism at Wesleyan University and American University. He also created a free online course, “Using R for Data Journalism,” to teach journalists how to use the open-source programming language R.

That course is part of a longer online course offered through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, “Intro to R for Journalists: How to Find Great Stories in Data.” Tran is the instructor for that free course as well.

Read the stories

• Assistance Not Approved
• ‘The Real Damage’
• The Last Days Inside Trailer 83
• The Ring in the Ashes
• ‘My Sincere Condolences‘

The post How they did it: Washington Post reporters reveal FEMA failures, denial of disaster aid to Black families in the South appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In the months after a state raises its minimum wage, fewer residents miss their rent payments, staving off the risk of eviction, finds a comprehensive analysis of U.S. residential leases forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Economics.

The paper, “Minimum Wage Increases and Eviction Risk,” also finds that when minimum wages go up, the default rate declines more for tenants with low monthly rent payments, compared with tenants who pay relatively high rents. The authors define a default as a tenant missing rent for a month, a potential precursor to eviction.

Rent is “one of the most important expenses that low-income households will face,” says Moussa Diop, one of the authors and an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, who studies rental markets.

By the end of the last decade, 46% of renting households used one-third of their income for housing, with some 24% of households putting more than half of their incomes toward rent, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Diop and co-authors Sumit Agarwal and Brent Ambrose examine a sample of 984,376 leases signed from 2000 to 2009 in 39 states, 25 of which enacted minimum wage increases during that period. The leases covered 2,248 properties across 173 metropolitan areas. The data comes from RentBureau, which the authors retrieved via Wharton Research Data Services at the University of Pennsylvania. Data collection methods changed in the 2010s and the Wharton research service does not provide more recent RentBureau data, the authors explain in the paper.

They find renters in states that raised the minimum wage experienced 10.6% fewer defaults than similar renters in states that did not up their wage floor.

On average, states increased their minimum wage by $0.57 for each hike, about a 10% bump and amounting to nearly $100 extra per month for an average full-time minimum wage worker. Over the nine years studied, the average minimum wage earner in states that raised their wage saw base earnings increase by $1.73 per hour, about 30%.

Landlords, in turn, appear to have recouped some, but not all, of the minimum wage hikes in the form of higher rents. One month after a minimum wage increase, rents on average increased by $53.90, compared with the average rent over the six months before a minimum wage change.

Despite the results suggesting some landlords capitalize when minimum wages go up, the findings on rent defaults “provide evidence that efforts to stabilize lower-income households via increases in the minimum wage do in fact reduce the riskiness of low-income households,” the authors write, referring to the risk of eviction.

It’s worth noting the authors studied the relationship between rent defaults and whether or not a state raised its minimum wage, not the amount of a minimum wage increase. They also did not examine local rent control or minimum wage laws, as they explain in the paper that their focus is on “cross-state, rather than within-state, variations in lease defaults in response to state minimum wage changes.”

However, they ran a subsequent analysis excluding California, Maryland and New York — states with cities that have relatively strong renter protections. The core findings were not affected.

Where to find data on eviction filings

Evictions are legal proceedings. They begin with an eviction notice. Once an eviction notice is served, tenants usually have several days, depending on local laws, to respond to their landlord’s breach of contract allegation. Nonpayment of rent is by far the most common reason landlords file eviction notices.

“During the past decade, the incomes of poor Americans have fallen or flat-lined, housing costs have soared and public policy has failed to bridge the gap,” writes Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond in a 2018 essay published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. “As a result, the majority of poor renting families in America now devote at least half of their income to covering housing costs, and eviction has become a common yet consequential event in their lives.”

Eviction data can be hard to come by, but it’s not impossible to find. Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which Desmond founded, compiles up-to-date eviction filing information for six states and 31 cities. Since eviction filings are legal proceedings, they are generally subject to open records requests, though the process for obtaining records vary by state.

It is important to remember that not all evictions go through a formalized process. A tenant facing eviction warnings from a landlord, even if the landlord never begins the legal process, might choose to leave their rental rather than continue to live under an eviction threat. These are usually called “extra-legal” or “informal” evictions and they can go beyond threats — sometimes landlords change locks or remove tenants’ items from their units, according to preliminary findings published in March 2021 by researchers at the University of Washington. Informal evictions are not captured in data because, by definition, they occur outside of a trackable system, such as court proceedings.

Some states offer free online data on formal evictions. The New York State Unified Court System, for example, offers a high-level dashboard with updated data on eviction filings. Massachusetts also has an interactive dashboard. The Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit Congress established in 1974, provides an eviction law database with regulations by state and for 30 local jurisdictions.

The federal government doesn’t tally evictions. A proposed Senate bill that would establish a national evictions database has stalled in the House banking committee since December 2019. In a November 2021 report to Congress, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development describes some of the challenges associated with developing a national evictions database:

“Collecting, assembling, and correctly interpreting court records across multiple court jurisdictions is enormously complex and time consuming. Collecting data on extra-legal evictions on a national scale is arguably even harder because there is no formal record.”

Minimum wage research is evolving

Given the overall lack of data on evictions, the data the authors use in the forthcoming article is unusually comprehensive in that it provides an almost decade-long glimpse of lease agreements across a large swath of U.S. metropolitan areas, even though data is from the early 2000s.

Numerous studies investigate how minimum wages affect employment, but the forthcoming paper is among the first to explore the relationship between minimum wages and housing.

One of the most influential minimum wage studies comes from Princeton University economists David Card and the late Alan Krueger, published in 1994 in the American Economic Review. It compared employment effects in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after New Jersey raised its minimum wage in 1992 while Pennsylvania’s held steady. Low-wage fast food jobs grew 13% more in New Jersey than in Pennsylvania, they found. The paper upended what was then a common assumption that raising the minimum wage would lead to less employment.

More recently, a May 2019 analysis in the Quarterly Journal of Economics examined 138 state minimum wage increases from 1979 to 2016 and found “the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over the five years following the increase.”

Meanwhile, a May 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper finds minimum wage hikes in Seattle in the mid-2010s — culminating with a $13 an hour minimum in 2016 — coincided with reduced hours of 2.7% for workers earning under $19 an hour. The authors note it would be incorrect to “assume our specific findings generalize to minimum wage policies set by other localities or at the federal or state level.” The paper has since been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal.

Social science research is similar to research in the hard sciences — for instance, research on the rapidly evolving COVID-19 landscape — in that no single study is likely to be definitive, but rather adds to the knowledge base.

“There are studies that have documented negative and positive effects [of minimum wage increases] and we are just providing some effect that is positive, on average,” Diop says. “We are not saying this closes the debate on minimum wages.”

Additional resources

A $15 minimum wage: What the research says

Eviction: The physical, financial and mental health consequences of losing your home

Eviction tracking data from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University: Maps and data

The post Minimum wage hikes linked to reduced eviction risk: Research appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

With rising rents and financial strife from the COVID-19 pandemic rippling through U.S. cities, some municipalities are turning to rent regulation as a policy to help tenants stay in their homes.

Voters in St. Paul, Minnesota, passed one of the nation’s strictest rent regulation measures in early November, capping rent hikes there at 3% annually. Unlike other ordinances, rent regulation in St. Paul is not linked to inflation and new construction is not exempt. The St. Paul ordinance is also unusual in that it applies to all types of rentals in buildings of any age.

The law is set to take effect next year, though the city still has to work out the details and some housing developers have told the Minneapolis Star Tribune they will re-evaluate their building plans.

Other cities are moving in the same direction. Minneapolis also recently paved the way for rent regulation; Santa Ana, California, passed a rent cap ordinance; and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is on the record as a rent regulation supporter.

Rent control versus rent stabilization

Rent regulation is a blanket term for government intervention in the residential rental market involving either rent control or rent stabilization measures. Rent control generally refers to hard rent caps, limiting the amount a landlord can charge for a protected unit. Rent stabilization allows for yearly rent increases, usually a small percentage of the previous year’s rent.

Economists typically think strict rent caps constrain housing supply in the long run. The argument boils down to this: The U.S. needs more housing, not less, and rent control stifles developers’ profit incentive to build. For economists, it’s about how supply and demand affect prices. When it comes to rental housing, supply and demand are out of whack — there’s more demand than supply. Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage buyer, estimates the U.S. is short 3.8 million residential units — apartments or houses for rent or sale. More supply should lead to lower rents, the economists’ argument goes.

“Advocates argue that, in some markets, rent control policies are a necessity to ensure affordability, tenant stabilization, and the rights of tenants,” write University of Dayton political science professor Joshua Ambrosius and his co-authors in one of the papers featured below. “Critics, including many economists, free-market supporters, and landlords, counter that these policies — even in mild forms — create inefficiencies in the rental housing market and have adverse effects on the quantity and quality of rental housing.”

Research focuses on dollars and cents

Economists have tended to focus on the quantity, quality and cost of housing when they study rent regulation. From an academic perspective, it can be difficult to study in detail how tenants benefit by being able to stay in their neighborhoods for years.

These benefits could include relationships, professional, personal and educational, that develop over time and can promote upward economic mobility. Maybe a tenant in a rent-regulated unit can afford to live close enough to walk their kids to school, or have a short commute to work. Simply put, there are non-monetary benefits that come with housing stability.

Public financial data captures monthly rents, property sales and new construction that developers undertake (or don’t) in response to rent regulation. That data can’t quantify the value an individual or family gets from being in a neighborhood for a long time. Such data can be gathered through surveys or interviews with tenants, but qualitative studies can be costly and there are ethical considerations for researchers, such as ensuring confidentiality for subjects. In short, the data that is easily available on tenants and rental buildings is the data that gets studied.

“Economists tend to slight the importance tenants attach to security of tenure,” University of California, Riverside economics professor Richard Arnott wrote in 2003.  “A housing unit is a tenant’s home. Coming to know her neighbors and the local shops, she will develop at least some sense of community.”

A brief history of rent regulation in the U.S.

California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Oregon offer various forms of rent regulation at the state level, according to the nonprofit National Multifamily Housing Council. There are 25 states that prevent municipalities from enacting rent control.

Rent control emerged in the U.S. after the country entered World War II. “Putting the country on a war footing required massive relocation of labor, with consequent pressure on many local housing markets,” Arnott explains in a 1995 paper. “Controls were imposed to ensure affordable housing and to prevent profiteering.”

After the war came a homebuilding boom. By 1950, New York City was the only place that kept wartime rent controls, essentially freezing rent increases. Arnott refers to those measures as first-generation rent control. They form “the basis for the common opposition to rent control among economists,” according to Arnott.

Most modern versions of rent regulation emerged in the 1970s, including in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. These second-generation rent regulations “commonly permit automatic percentage rent increases related to the rate of inflation,” Arnott writes.

They often allow landlords to apply for exemptions — for example, if they are having trouble with cash flow. The new St. Paul ordinance allows landlords to apply for exemptions for a variety of reasons, including property tax changes and unavoidable maintenance costs.

The third generation of rent control, which Arnott explores in the 2003 paper, is called tenancy rent control. This is where rent increases are controlled for a particular tenant, but the base rent can be adjusted for new tenants once the original tenant vacates.

Arnott argues in the 2003 paper that tenancy rent control can be a decent compromise between the need for tenants to achieve housing stability and landlords to make money and invest in building upkeep. For example, when a tenant vacates a unit, the landlord could raise the base rent above market rate to front-load profits, in anticipation of gaining below market rent in later years of the new tenant’s tenure.

In a recent non-peer-reviewed policy brief from the New York University Furman Center, Sophie House and her co-authors propose rent regulation measures should focus on preventing egregious rent hikes and include targeted subsidies, such as property tax credits for landlords.

Local building regulations and the design of specific rent regulation ordinances will vary. It’s important that journalists understand whether proposed or adopted rent control ordinances look more like first wave or third wave historical rent regulation. And it’s not just rent control that can affect housing supply — zoning laws on the books in certain jurisdictions can limit the supply of multifamily housing.

Here are a few takeaways from the papers featured in the research roundup below:

• Rent regulation helps tenants stay in their homes, but landlords and developers may respond in the long run by building more expensive housing not subject to rent regulation.
• Buildings covered by rent regulation may still be subject to investor takeovers aimed at displacing tenants from rent-regulated units.
• Strict rent controls can depress property values for rent-controlled and nearby market-rate buildings.
• But less restrictive rent regulation is not associated with lower rates of new housing construction or lower overall property values.

Read on for more.

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The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco. Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian. American Economic Review, September 2019.

The research focus: The authors explore whether a 1994 rent control expansion in San Francisco meant tenants were more likely to stay in their homes and in the city.

• Because rent control was linked to the year a building was built, the law produced a natural experiment, leaving “very similar buildings and tenants without rent control,” the authors write.

Key background: Buildings in San Francisco with five or more apartments became subject to rent control in 1979. New construction was exempt — so were owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units. Over the years, investors would buy those smaller buildings, then sell a portion of building shares to someone living in the building or someone who would move in, making the buildings owner-occupied.

• “These small multi-family structures made up about 44% of the rental housing stock in 1990, making this a large exemption to the rent control law,” the authors write.

• For buildings built before 1980, the 1994 law removed this mom-and-pop loophole investors were exploiting.

The data: The authors use address history for San Franciscans from 1980 to 2016. This dataset from private firm Infutor includes subsequent addresses of people who left the city and moved somewhere else in the U.S. during those years. They parse renters from buyers using property records from private firm DataQuick, and they track large building investments with permit data from the city planning office. Lastly, they track condo conversions with parcel history data from the city assessor’s office. The authors split renters into two groups: those living in a small multifamily building built between 1900 and 1979 and those in a small multifamily building built between 1980 and 1990.

• The second group covers a much smaller timeframe, so it includes fewer renters. But, they span many neighborhoods across the city.

What the research says: Tenants in rent-controlled apartments stayed in their homes longer — they were 10% to 20% more likely to be at their 1994 address 10 years on. They were also less likely to leave San Francisco compared with tenants not living in rent-controlled apartments. Black, Hispanic and Asian tenants in rent-controlled apartments were all more likely to stay in the city relative to white tenants covered by rent control.

• “We find tenants covered by rent control do place a substantial value on the benefit, as revealed by their choice to remain in their apartments longer than those without rent control,” the authors write.

• But, because landlords and investors responded to the 1994 law with condo conversions and new construction, rent control “not only lowered the supply of rental housing in the city, but also shifted the city’s housing supply toward less affordable types of housing that likely cater to the tastes of higher income individuals,” the authors find.

New Dynamics of Rent Gap Formation in New York City Rent-Regulated Housing: Privatization, Financialization, and Uneven Development. Benjamin Teresa. Urban Geography, March 2019.

The research focus: Benjamin Teresa, an assistant professor of real estate and finance at Virginia Commonwealth University, takes a close look at how investors in 2005 bought the Riverton Houses, a rent-regulated, multifamily housing development in Harlem, New York, to try to profit from rent gaps.

• A rent gap is the difference between rent charged and rent that could be charged in the market if the building owner regularly invested in things like building upgrades and grounds maintenance — or, if the owner neglected the property.

• “Since 2001 professional investors connected to broader capital markets, such as private equity firms, have purchased tens of thousands of rent-regulated housing units, with some estimates placing investors’ market share at 10% of the total regulated rental housing stock and higher in some neighborhoods,” Teresa writes.

Key background: The New York City Council in 1994 loosened renter protections through something called vacancy decontrol. If rent on a stabilized unit reached $2,000 per month and the tenant moved out, the landlord could charge market rates thereon. Stabilization permitted landlords to impose only modest rent hikes. The threshold for vacancy decontrol bumped to about $2,700 per month in 2015. State law eliminated vacancy decontrol in 2019. Teresa explores one example of how investors profited from 25 years of vacancy decontrol.

The data: Teresa used public data on deed transfers, mortgage agreements and tax records for the Riverton Houses from 2005 to 2014, and the Commercial Mortgage Backed Security prospectus where investors projected the property’s income growth.

• Plus, Teresa interviewed 18 experts in affordable housing, including attorneys who represent tenants and staff members of housing development organizations. He also interviewed five real estate finance experts.

• Teresa focuses on the injection of speculative capital into the rent-stabilized market — less so on what happened to tenants in the Riverton Houses as a result of that speculation.

What the research says: The rent gap, and the potential for profit, was large for the Riverton Houses. Teresa calculates the average rent-stabilized unit would have taken about three decades to reach the deregulation threshold, where it could then be rented for market rates. The investors noted they would need to achieve market rates faster than that to make their debt payments. They didn’t meet their marks, “throwing Riverton into foreclosure and a series of new owners,” Teresa writes.

• The case of the Riverton Houses is ultimately a snapshot of the interplay between profit potential and inner city revitalization that occurred throughout the 1990s and 2000s across the U.S.

• The potential for high rents in low-rent buildings was “no longer limited to disinvested neighborhoods,” and “‘already gentrified’ neighborhoods may experience new cycles of investment because previous reinvestment waves have further increased potential rents,” Teresa finds.

A caveat: The paper explores one residential development in the nation’s most populous city. The findings are informative, but not necessarily generalizable to other developments in other cities.

• Still, “situating changing rent control law within the realm of privatization, and in this case more specifically the state’s role in expanding the scope for private extraction of urban land rent, connects this case with other examples of privatization that produce new income streams,” Teresa writes, specifically noting similar deregulation laws in San Francisco.

Forty Years of Rent Control: Reexamining New Jersey’s Moderate Local Policies after the Great Recession. Joshua Ambrosius, John Gilderbloom, William Steele, Wesley Meares and Dennis Keating. Cities, August 2015.

The research focus: There is no statewide rent control policy in New Jersey, but municipalities there can enact their own ordinances on rent regulation. The authors explore how 40 years of rent control in the state affect median rents, new construction and overall property values.

• “New Jersey, a national leader in tenants’ rights since the 1960s, is an excellent case study of the effects of moderate rent controls because so many (over 100) of its municipal governments have adopted these controls,” the authors write. “While not completely ideal, New Jersey is the best available laboratory for examining the impacts of rent control.”

Key background: Rent control ordinances in New Jersey cities arose during the 1970s. More recent rent control policies fall under the second wave of rent control, which tend to be less restrictive than the first wave. New Jersey has a variety of types of municipalities — cities, boroughs, towns and townships — but the authors refer to all of them as “cities” for short. Some cities tether allowable rent increases to cost of living calculations, while others allow a specific percentage increase within a range, most commonly between 3% and 4%.

The data: Focusing on 2010, the authors identified 87 cities without rent control and 74 cities with rent control, with an average population of 28,800. They use 2010 census data, the most recent available at the time, to parse differences between cities with and without rent control ordinances.

What the research says: Average monthly rents are $63 higher in non-rent control cities — $1,090 versus $1,027 in cities with rent control. Rent control cities have twice the population, on average, as non-rent control cities. From 2000 to 2010, the authors do not observe any major difference in new construction or changes in property values between rent control and non-rent control cities.

• “Rent control cities have, on average, 50% more rental units, 70% more Black residents, and nearly 25% lower median incomes,” the authors write, with rent control cities experiencing greater population growth and lower vacancy rates from 2000 to 2010.

• Median income, not the presence of rent control, is a stronger predictor of rents, rooms per unit and rent per room. The authors note that recent rent control ordinances in New Jersey often “lack the teeth of past approaches that created firm price ceilings.”

Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts. David Autor, Christopher Palmer and Parag Pathak. Journal of Political Economy, June 2014.

The research focus: The authors take advantage of a natural experiment occurring in the mid-1990s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assess how a strict rent control ordinance there for decades directly and indirectly affected rental prices. Roughly 100,000 people lived in the city at the time.

• “Distinct from the ‘direct’ effect of decontrol, which by definition operates only on formerly controlled properties, the indirect channel may affect the market value of both decontrolled and never-controlled properties by increasing the desirability of the neighborhoods in which they are located,” the authors write.

Key background: Certain rentals in Cambridge were subject to strict caps on rent increases from 1970 to 1994. The caps applied to rentals built before 1969 that were not owner-occupied. Rent-controlled units were often about 40% cheaper than non-rent controlled units, and controlled and non-controlled buildings stood side-by-side. A statewide popular vote in 1994 ended rent control by a 51%-to-49% margin, though 60% of Cambridge residents who voted wanted to keep the controls.

• Tenants in rent-controlled units tended to have less income than those in market rate units, “though a significant number of units were also occupied by wealthy professionals,” the authors write.

The data: The main data comes from city administrative records on the assessed value of every condo and house in 1994 and 2004, plus information on condo conversions and the prices of every residential property sale from 1988 to 2005. The authors also track demographic changes with a decade of data from the Cambridge city census.

What the research says: Rent-controlled buildings were about half as valuable as market rate properties. After rent decontrol, their values jumped 25% compared with non-rent controlled buildings during the period studied. Market rate buildings also appreciated in value.  

• Residential property in Cambridge appreciated $7.7 billion from 1994 to 2004. The authors attribute $2 billion of that value increase to rent decontrol. About half of the appreciation came from units that were never controlled. The value of market rate properties was suppressed by the strict rent control ordinance, they find.

• Landlords invested more in their properties after rent decontrol, with the total permitted building improvements jumping from $21 million per year from 1991 to 1994 to $45 million per year from 1995 to 2004.

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Two new studies add to the growing body of evidence that racism plays a key role in the persistent preterm birth disparities that exist between Black and white women in the United States.

While there’s ongoing research on the association between preterm birth and factors such as pregnant women’s health or level of access to medical care, there’s mounting evidence, including the two recent studies, that societal factors, including racism, also have an impact on the rates of premature delivery.

In a paper published in September, a workgroup convened by the March of Dimes looks at existing literature on contributors to racial disparities in preterm births and finds racism at the root of it all.

Meanwhile, in another study also published in September, researchers at the University of Rochester chose 15 zip codes in Rochester, New York, and overlapped them with the map of historic discriminatory home loan practice of redlining. Their findings show how structural inequality casts a long shadow in today’s health outcomes.

Preterm birth, which is delivery before 37 weeks of pregnancy, is associated with a higher risk of death and long-term health complications in babies. Researchers are interested in preterm birth rates because it is bellwether of a community or a nation’s health.

“Since there are many things that impact preterm birth, it likely captures both issues around access to health care and the resources we’re able to provide patients,” says Dr. Stefanie Hollenbach, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “But it also captures elements of the community and social structures that may be related to health outcomes.”

Preterm birth is on the rise in most countries and is now the second leading cause of death for children younger than five, after pneumonia, according to the World Health Organization. Every year, about 15 million babies are born prematurely around the world. That’s about one in 10 births.

In the U.S. preterm birth rates are no better than global rates: 1 in 10 babies are born too soon, according to the March of Dimes, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization for maternal and infant health. Preterm birth is the second leading cause of infant mortality in the U.S. and the leading cause of death among Black babies, according to the organization. Black women have the highest rate of preterm births compared with all other races and ethnicities in the U.S.

Below we explain the two new studies in more detail, including interviews with some of the authors.

Associations Between Historically Redlined Districts and Racial Disparities in Current Obstetric Outcomes
Stefanie Hollenbach, Loralei Thornburg, J. Christopher Glantz and Elaine Hill. JAMA Network Open, September 2021

In 2016, a local Rochester newspaper, the Democrat & Chronicle, ran a story about the newly-available redlining maps, which were digitized by a four-university effort called Mapping Inequality. Two researchers at the University of Rochester read the newspaper article and wondered if the maps may help with understanding how discriminatory loan practices decades ago are associated with health outcomes today, including disparities in preterm birth rates.

The practice of redlining began in the 1930s with the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. HOLC created color-coded maps that told banks where it was “safe” to issue home mortgages.

The maps had four categories or grades: Green for “best” neighborhoods, blue for areas that were “still desirable,” yellow for “definitely declining,” and red for “hazardous” areas. Areas that were marked “hazardous” mostly included low-income people, foreign-born individuals and, in most cases, Black people.

The practice lasted for three decades, but even after HOLC closed and Congress passed the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 to ban housing discrimination based on race, religion and country of origin, the negative effects of redlining have persisted. Studies have shown that the practice has had long-lasting implications, not only affecting Black people’s socioeconomic status but also their health.

To explore their local community, the researchers looked at 64,804 birth certificates dated from 2005 to 2018 in 15 zip codes in Rochester, using the New York State Department of Health’s electronic birth certificate database. They then overlaid the data with the historic redlining maps. Some zip codes matched with a single redlining map designation and some included two or more designations.

They found preterm birth rates increased with worse HOLC color grades. The highest preterm birth rate —12.38% — was in the single zip code that overlapped with the area defined “hazardous” by HOLC map. The lowest preterm birth rate of 7.55% was found in a single zip code that overlapped with an area that was historically defined as “best” or “still desirable.” The overall preterm birth rate for the study population was 10.36%.

The associations persisted even after researchers controlled for levels of poverty and education and race of the parents.

They also found that the odds of being diagnosed with severe maternal depression and substance use disorder were significantly higher in areas that were labeled as “hazardous” compared with those labeled as “best” or “still desirable” in redlining maps.

“I think as clinicians, it’s important to recognize that there are so many facets to our patients’ lived experiences that are impacting their health outcomes,” says lead author Hollenbach. “All of us in the community, including physicians really need to be motivated to understand that health care is only one piece of it and our community structures are really impacting the differences as well.”

Even through the authors controlled for race, they didn’t do the analysis separately for Black and white women. As part of the study’s limitations, they also say that the results may or may not be generalizable to other U.S. cities.

“My hope is that this is the beginning of a long line of research with my colleagues where we can think about how to address persistent poverty in the Rochester area and whether some of the historic practices could be something that we can try to disentangle,” says co-author Elaine Hill, an economist and associate professor of public health science, economics and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “I feel like we need to grapple with this history.”

Explaining the Black-White Disparity in Preterm Birth: A Consensus Statement From a Multi-Disciplinary Scientific Work Group Convened by the March of Dimes
Paula Braveman; et al. Reproductive Epidemiology, September 2021.

In 2017, the March of Dimes convened a multidisciplinary workgroup to review the existing literature on the persistent racial disparities in preterm birth in the U.S. The workgroup chair led a subcommittee in drafting an initial paper and subsequent revisions for members’ review. Revisions continued until consensus was reached, according to the paper.

The team looked at 456 peer-reviewed, English-language articles published in the past decade. “Limited web-based material from scientifically trustworthy sources [e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports] also were included,” they write.

Based on the metaphor of a river flowing from its upstream source to its downstream destination, the workgroup placed 30 potential factors leading to preterm birth intro three categories: upstream, midstream and downstream, depending on the proximity of their effects to preterm birth.

Downstream factors include prenatal care, substance use disorder, age and chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Midstream factors include stress, depression, social support, income, education and neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage. The single item identified as the upstream factor was racism, which could directly and indirectly explain the disparities in midstream and downstream factors, according to the paper.

“No one of these downstream factors could explain the Black-white disparity by itself, but if you put them all together, they might,” says lead author Dr. Paula Braveman, a social epidemiologist, a professor of family and community medicine and founding director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “And then that raised the question: If you have so many biologically plausible [mechanisms], is there a common source that’s setting them in motion? And racism was the only factor that any of the members of the committee identified.”

The authors also looked at studies that explore the role of genes in preterm births and found that genetic factors at most may explain a small fraction of the disparity in preterm birth rates between Black and white women.

“When considering the potential role of genetic factors, it is important to note scientific consensus that race is primarily a social, not a biological, construct,” they write in their consensus statement.

The authors say that racism explains the racial disparity in socioeconomic factors. The legacy of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow laws, racial residential segregation, and ongoing discrimination in employment, housing, policing and sentencing “have relentlessly deprived African Americans of socioeconomic opportunity,” they write.

Racial discrimination is also a powerful direct source of stress, researchers write. Stress can lead to changes to the body’s immune pathways leading to immune and inflammatory conditions, which are among the factors believed to be associated with premature delivery.

“What neuroscience has revealed, particularly over the last 10 to 20 years, is the enormous role that stress, and particularly chronic stress, plays in health through pathways that begin with neuro-endocrine disturbances that kicks into motion mechanisms that produce inflammation,” explains Braveman.

In short, the woman’s lived experience, including stress from racism, have already done a level of damaged that’s not going to be significantly reversed, she says.

“My hope would be that if [researchers and clinicians] read this review paper, it would make them more receptive to the notion that racism kills,” Braveman says.

Learn more about redlining

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This piece was originally published in August 2020, updated in March 2021, and updated again in October 2021 to reflect new research on evictions and the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the federal eviction moratorium.

Federal and state mandates have shielded certain renters from eviction for most of the weeks since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the nation’s economy in March 2020.

But on August 26, 2021, the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacked authority to continue halting evictions, ending the federal agency’s ability to keep renters in their homes. The most recent CDC moratorium had been in force since Aug. 3 in parts of the country where the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus was spreading rapidly.

New York, Washington D.C. and Minnesota are now the only jurisdictions with relatively expansive eviction bans. New Jerseyans with low income — defined as 120% below a county’s median income — also remain protected from eviction.

There is no national database of evictions and there is no state that produces regular data on evictions. But The Eviction Lab at Princeton University keeps a current tally of eviction filings in six states and 31 cities.

Eviction — and the threat of eviction — is traumatic for tenants and can be costly for landlords needing to make repairs or upgrades before re-renting a unit. Though tens of thousands of eviction notices are filed each year in major U.S. cities, eviction affects rural and urban renters alike.

We originally published this roundup in August 2020 and updated it in March 2021 with two more studies on the consequences of eviction — one on adverse birth outcomes and the other on the effectiveness of housing policy as a pandemic response strategy.

And now, as of October 2021, we’ve added two more studies — a comprehensive look at landlords who are serial eviction filers and another on eviction filing patterns in 2020. The research highlighted here shows that keeping a roof over one’s head is critical for financial, physical and mental health.

Evictions are legal proceedings. They begin with an eviction notice. Once an eviction notice is served, tenants usually have several days, depending on local laws, to respond to their landlord’s breach of contract allegation. Nonpayment of rent is by far the most common reason landlords file eviction notices.

While the federal government doesn’t tally evictions, a Senate bill introduced in late 2019 would establish a national evictions database. The Eviction Lab conservatively estimates that roughly 900,000 renting households are evicted in the U.S. each year.

“For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30% of their income on housing, allowing enough money for other necessities, such as food and transportation,” writes Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, who founded The Eviction Lab, in one of the papers featured here.

If a tenant can make up the back rent or otherwise satisfy the landlord — finding a new home for a pet in a no-pet apartment, for example — then landlord and tenant can avoid litigation. If not, the landlord may decide to proceed to court. If a housing judge grants an eviction order, the landlord can then file with local law enforcement, usually a sheriff’s office, and pay a fee to have law enforcement evict the tenant. In a given jurisdiction, there are likely to be many more eviction notices filed than evictions carried out. Landlords often use eviction threats to pressure tenants into paying past due rent and late fees, research shows.

It’s important to note that for many tenants, housing trouble and conflict with landlords is likely happening well before the formalized bureaucratic process begins — before the law is involved. One tenant in Los Angeles told an academic researcher that she stopped paying rent after living with bedbugs and cockroaches for months, and after asking her landlord numerous times to repair cracks in the kitchen floor where she supposed the pests were getting in. A single mother with four children, she was working 12 hours a day. To her, withholding rent was an appropriate response to the conditions her family was forced to live in. Her landlord sent an eviction notice but she didn’t receive a court date because she didn’t file a response within the required five-day timeframe. She was busy and didn’t know how to navigate the legal process. She lost her eviction case by default. Kyle Nelson, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent 2014 volunteering at a tenants’ rights clinic in Los Angeles, chronicling that story and others in which the complexities of life butt up against the precision of the legal system, in a December 2019 paper published in Social Problems.

Read on to learn what the research says about the state of eviction in America today — with perspectives from landlords and tenants, an analysis of mobile home evictions, a study showing how health insurance can reduce evictions, plus more.

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Serial Eviction Filing: Civil Courts, Property Management, and the Threat of Displacement
Lillian Leung, Peter Hepburn and Matthew Desmond. Social Forces, September 2021.

Serial eviction filers are landlords or property managers who file for eviction multiple times against the same tenant. The authors use 8.1 million court eviction records from 2010 to 2016 across 958 counties in 28 states to explore this practice, specifically as serial filings relate to “extracting monetary sanctions from tenants.” The dataset represents one-third of renter households, though the results are primarily based on the 1 million filings in 2014, “the most recent available year with sufficient subsequent years of court records,” the authors write.

The authors treat as serial filers those landlords who file for eviction two or more times against a household. Most serial filings happen within about two-and-a-half months of each other, though sometimes there is a longer stretch between filings. That’s why the authors chose 2014 — the data was comprehensive enough for that year, but also comprehensive enough in the years before and after in order to capture serial filers who take a long time between filings.

In 2014, there were 79 eviction filings for every 1,000 renting households in the 28 states studied. Nearly one-third of households that received at least one eviction filing were subject to serial filings.  Each eviction filing cost tenants $180 in late fees and court costs, equivalent to an average of about 20.3% of monthly rent.

Landlords and property managers in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia North Carolina and Georgia had the highest serial filing rates. Landlords and property managers in Florida, Washington, Utah Alabama, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Kansas, Indiana and Illinois were least likely to be serial filers.

Rules and regulations vary by state, and property managers interviewed for this study — 16 in Charleston, South Carolina and 17 in Mobile, Alabama — expressed different reasons for using serial filings.

“In South Carolina, when tenants were late, property managers used repeated eviction filings more for rent and fee collection than for displacement,” the authors write. “In Alabama, where the cost of executing an eviction was considerably higher, eviction served instead as a means of recovering possession of a unit. Whereas eviction was among the first moves in South Carolina, it was among the last in Alabama.”

U.S. Eviction Filing Patterns in 2020
Peter Hepburn, et. al. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, April 2021.

Several of the authors were involved in developing The Eviction Lab’s up-to-date eviction tracker for select jurisdictions. The data for this study came from 5 state court systems, 26 at the county level, and one city court system, Boston. While the data isn’t generalizable nationally, it “does resemble the nation as a whole in terms of sociodemographic composition and housing market characteristics,” the authors write.

From March 15 to December 31 of last year, the authors observe 65% fewer evictions than in an average year within their dataset. The dramatic drop in evictions “can be understood as a measure” of the bans at the local, state and federal levels, in addition to federal and state financial assistance programs related to the pandemic.

During a roughly two week gap in federal eviction protection in 2020, from late August to early September, evictions shot up. Case filing rates reached pre-pandemic levels during the week of August 30. In places without state or local eviction bans during that time, eviction filings were 12% higher than the historical average.

“Because the CDC moratorium required the tenant to understand and exercise rights, and allowed landlords to file evictions and challenge tenant declarations of eligibility, it left substantial gaps in protection,” the authors note. “These gaps were widened by agency guidance that allowed landlords to challenge tenant declarations of eligibility, courts to adjudicate cases, and widespread inconsistency in interpretation, adoption, and enforcement at the state and local levels. Thus, as the year progressed, a growing number of households faced the risk for eviction.”

Association of Eviction during Pregnancy with Adverse Birth Outcomes
Erika Cordova-Ramos, Robert Koenig and Michael Silverstein. JAMA Pediatrics, March 2021.

The authors compare differences in birth outcomes among 10,135 infants in Georgia who experienced an eviction action during pregnancy and 78,727 infants whose mothers also experienced an eviction action, but not while pregnant, between 2000 and 2016.

An eviction action is the first step in the formal eviction process — essentially, it’s a landlord taking a tenant to court to force the tenant to vacate the rented property because they owe rent or violated lease terms. If the tenant doesn’t respond to the landlord’s claim or the judge rules for the landlord, the tenant is issued an eviction judgment, which eventually leads to eviction. Short of an actual eviction, the threat of eviction “is acutely stressful, and those facing eviction may engage in behaviors that are particularly harmful during pregnancy, such as forgoing meals and prenatal care or engaging in physically demanding work,” the authors write.

Georgia had twice the overall eviction rate of the rest of the country in 2016, 4.7 evictions per 100 rentals, according to the authors’ data. They obtained birth data from the Georgia Department of Public Health and data on eviction actions from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a business analytics firm.

They find that eviction during pregnancy is associated with lower birth weight, particularly during the second and third trimesters, “when most fetal weight gain occurs.” They associate second- and third-trimester eviction actions with an average birth weight reduction of roughly .08 pounds. Results were similar for Black and white women, both of whom make up 96% of the sample, though Black women were most represented. Among the roughly 10,000 women who experienced an eviction action while pregnant, 78% were Black, 18% were white, 2.4% were multiracial, 0.4% were Asian, 0.2% were American Indian or Alaska Native and 0.03% were Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. The relationship between eviction and lower birth weight held when the authors looked at a subset of mothers during the sample period who had an eviction during one pregnancy but not another.

This study adds to other research on housing and birth outcomes. The authors note that “unlike poverty and homelessness, eviction offers a discrete and tractable target for intervention. Policies that improve housing affordability, or even more modest reforms like ensuring legal assistance in eviction court, might reduce the likelihood of eviction.”

Eviction, Health Inequity, and the Spread of COVID-19: Housing Policy as a Primary Pandemic Mitigation Strategy
Emily Benfer, et. al. Journal of Urban Health, January 2021.

The authors reference more than 100 pieces of research to explain how housing policies, such as eviction bans, can help curb disease spread during a pandemic. Noting that COVID-19 spreads through close physical contact, they write that “eviction increases the likelihood of ‘couch surfing,’ residing in shelters, sleeping in cars or outdoors, and doubling up with friends and family who may themselves be at risk for COVID-19.”

COVID-19 spreads similarly to other respiratory diseases, like tuberculosis and the flu, and research suggests overcrowding can increase their spread, according to the authors. They write that people at greatest risk of eviction are more likely to have existing poor health conditions, such lung disease, that increase their COVID risk. Cited studies also show that people of color, particularly Black renters, are evicted at higher rates than white renters. Notably, eviction is a scar on renters’ records, with landlords less likely to rent to someone with a prior eviction, according to the authors.

“In light of the undisputed connection between eviction and health outcomes, eviction prevention, through moratoria and other supportive measures, is a key component of pandemic control strategies to mitigate COVID-19 spread and death,” the authors write.

Heavy is the House: Rent Burden among the American Urban Poor
Matthew Desmond. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, January 2018.

Desmond, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, charts how rent has become an increasing burden for households with low incomes in recent decades.

“For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30% of their income on housing, allowing enough money for other necessities, such as food and transportation,” he writes.

But 52% of U.S. families that are poor and rent spend more than half of their income on housing, according to Desmond. Households are considered poor if they fall below federal poverty guidelines, which vary based on the number of people in a household. People making between $10,000 and $15,000 each year spent 42% of their income on housing, on average, in 2011, up from 33% in 1991. Desmond notes that evictions are common in urban neighborhoods where residents have less relative income. The New York City housing court system, for instance, processes roughly 350,000 yearly eviction cases, most of them for nonpayment of rent, according to Desmond.

“Most basically, the current affordable-housing crisis is the result of costs rising at a much faster rate than incomes,” he writes.

Serial Filing: How Landlords Use the Threat of Eviction
Philip Garboden and Eva Rosen. City & Community, May 2019.

The authors interviewed 127 randomly sampled landlords and property managers in Baltimore, Dallas and Cleveland to understand how they use evictions — and the threat thereof. Among landlords and property managers in the sample, 40% were Black, 47% were white and 60% were male. About half of the sample held primary rental properties in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty.

“We find that landlords generally try to avoid costly evictions, instead relying on the serial threat of eviction,” Philip Garboden and Eva Rosen write, emphasis theirs. “By redefining renters as debtors, filing assists in rent collection by leveraging the state to materially and symbolically support the landlord’s debt collection.”

In Baltimore, for example, the authors note there are roughly 6,500 evictions executed each year, compared with 150,000 eviction filings — exceeding the number of rental units by some 20,000. The interviews reveal landlords who constantly file for eviction against the same tenants. Eviction should not be viewed as a singular event, but rather, “an ongoing set of relations between landlord and tenant,” according to Garboden, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii, and Rosen, an assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University. They note their study is intentionally one-sided — its purpose is to capture the perspectives of landlords, not tenants.

Most landlords interviewed said they don’t want to evict tenants, some because they don’t want to put people out, but many because they find the eviction process burdensome. “Rick, the owner of seven rental properties in Cleveland, summed up landlords’ pervasive perspective on eviction succinctly: ‘Dealing with the evictions is a bunch of crap.’ More specifically, landlords believe the eviction process is capricious, incompetently implemented, and unfair,” the authors write.

Another finding: a tenant, even one who doesn’t pay rent in full, is often better than no tenant at all. “Kicking out a tenant means being ready to absorb the costs of turning over the unit,” write Garboden and Rosen. “At best, this entails touching up paint, making repairs, replacing or cleaning the carpet, and forgoing rent until a new tenant is found. Landlords estimate that this may run them anywhere between $500 and $1,500.”

Filing for an eviction without following through, on the other hand, only incurs a small fee for the landlord in most cases, while putting pressure on the tenant to pay past due rent. Some landlords and property managers saw eviction filings coupled with late fees as a legitimate and non-trivial source of revenue.

“The threat of eviction has important consequences on the tenant’s rental experience, providing an omnipresent signifier for poor renters that a house is not home,” the authors conclude.

The Threat of Home Eviction and its Effects on Health through the Equity Lens: A Systematic Review
Hugo Vásquez-Vera, Laia Palència, Ingrid Magna, Carlos Mena, Jaime Neira and Carme Borrell. Social Science & Medicine, February 2017.

The authors review results from 47 peer-reviewed articles that examine how the threat of eviction affects renters’ health. The articles were based on 45 studies, 33 of which focused on the U.S. and three-quarters of which were published after 2009.

Findings from several of those studies showed people over age 50 who fell behind on rent were more likely to experience depression. Other studies found renters living under the threat of eviction experienced poorer self-reported health outcomes, such as high blood pressure. Two articles found people threatened by eviction were more likely to have alcohol dependence, though other studies didn’t associate eviction threats with alcohol consumption. One study found the alcohol-eviction association among men, but not women.

“There is abundant evidence linking stressful life events and psychological, neuroendocrine and immunological changes that can impact mental and physical health, either directly through stress-related physiology or through the adoption of unhealthy behaviors,” the authors write.

Displaced in Place: Manufactured Housing, Mass Eviction, and the Paradox of State Intervention
Esther Sullivan. American Sociological Review, February 2017.

Esther Sullivan, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver, “examines housing insecurity within manufactured housing — the single largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States, home to about 18 million low-income residents.”

Many mobile home owners exist somewhere between renters and traditional home owners. A quarter of people living in mobile homes live in poverty, according to Sullivan, and one-third of mobile homeowners have land-lease arrangements. That means they own their mobile home but rent the ground below, making “the risk of eviction inscribed into the very land on which they live,” Sullivan writes.

Over two years, Sullivan interviewed residents in several mobile home parks in Florida and Texas, which have among the highest rates of people living in mobile home parks. Sullivan lived in parks in both states during her research. While Florida and Texas have very different laws regulating mobile home eviction, Florida is widely seen as having stronger laws protecting mobile home residents than Texas.

There were some key demographic differences between the two Florida parks and two Texas parks Sullivan included in her analysis. The Florida parks were primarily made up of people over age 55 who were predominately white. The Texas parks had residents of all ages and many were Central American immigrants. Sullivan offers that those demographic differences may have affected how residents responded to their evictions, but she also finds significant similarities among residents of the four parks, such as living in poverty and numerous past instances of forced relocation.

The mobile park closures “resulted in serious upheaval for residents,” but differences emerged as residents began to manage the “terms and timing of the relocation,” Sullivan writes. In Florida, with its cottage industry of mobile home moving services, public-private partnership arrangements made the terms and timing confusing and stressful for soon-to-be evicted mobile park residents. Owners of the mobile park where Sullivan lived said they would cover relocation costs up to $10,000, on top of a $3,000 voucher from the state for relocation, “because they had put together a relocation package by partnering with two other privately owned companies,” Sullivan writes. Residents in the Florida park received eviction notices in October and had expected to have until the spring to move. But to accommodate the schedule of one of the privately-owned moving companies, that move-out date was suddenly pushed up to January.

“In Florida, residents experienced a stalled and then accelerated notification period as corporate intermediaries restructured the relocation in line with their own terms and timeline,” Sullivan writes. “Within Florida’s system, residents lost their ability to choose their moving dates and contractors, and they were pushed to exit their homes before the date they were legally entitled.”

Texas, with its hands-off approach and no financial aid for relocation, was different. Residents in the mobile parks there quickly pushed to relocate after they received eviction notices in the spring. The forced moves were not without harm, depleting some families’ savings. Others were able to use tax rebate checks that coincided with the eviction to pay for their moves. But Sullivan finds, overall, that residents in the Texas parks experienced less stress and turmoil compared with the Floridians.

“Paradoxically, Florida’s more protective regulatory environment incubated a more prolonged, disorienting and detrimental fallout for residents,” Sullivan writes.

From Foreclosure to Eviction: Housing Insecurity in Corporate-Owned Single-Family Rentals
Elora Lee, Raymond Richard Duckworth, Benjamin Miller, Michael Lucas Atlanta and Shiraj Pokharel. Cityscape, November 2018.

The authors explore how corporate ownership of rental properties relates to evictions, based on evictions records from Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta. They matched eviction filings with tax assessment and deed records. Evictions in the county were geographically concentrated. While more than 20% of all rental households received an eviction notice in 2015, and more than 100 eviction notices were filed daily, in some zip codes 40% of rental households were subject to eviction notices that year.

Properties that were corporate-owned saw much higher rates of eviction. Firms that had more than 15 single-family rental homes were 68% more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices, “even after controlling for past foreclosure status, property characteristics and neighborhood,” the authors write.

One corporate owner, Colony Capital, was 205% more likely to file eviction notices compared with non-corporate entities, on average. Black tenants along with households headed by women were, in general, more likely than other tenants and households to receive an eviction notice.

“One possible reason large corporate landlords backed by institutional investors may have higher eviction filing notices is that they may routinely use eviction notices as a rent collection strategy,” the authors write.

The Effects of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Nationwide Home Evictions and Eviction-Court Initiations: United States, 2000–2016
Naomi Zewde, Erica Eliason, Heidi Allen and Tal Gross. American Journal of Public Health, October 2019.

The Affordable Care Act provided new health coverage for about 14 million Americans under Medicaid. Using data from The Eviction Lab, the authors estimate the consequences of expanded government health care coverage on nationwide county-level evictions and eviction filings from 2000 to 2016. They associate Medicaid expansion with yearly eviction filing rates dropping by 1.59 per 1,000 rental units. They also found that higher rates of Black residents in a county were associated with higher eviction filing rates, after controlling for poverty and rent costs.

The authors offer three potential reasons for the association between expanded health coverage and lower overall eviction rates. The first is simply that families with health coverage are better off financially because they’re less likely to incur large medical bills. The second is that having access to medical care “may alleviate poor health as a trigger for housing-related economic hardships,” they write. Finally, better health may mean better employment — less time missing work for health reasons, for example, and less risk of subsequently being fired. And while health coverage can reduce evictions, evictions can worsen health.

“Evicted families are more likely to accept unsafe and inadequate housing conditions because of damaged credit and rental histories and a heightened need to secure immediate shelter, leading to both acute and long-term risk of worsened health outcomes,” the authors write.

Does Eviction Cause Poverty? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Cook County, IL
John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum and Winnie van Dijk. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, August 2019.

With 30,000 to 40,000 evictions cases filed each year in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, the authors analyzed nearly every eviction case filed there from 2000 to 2016, linked to credit bureau data on defendants’ credit reports. They find 55% of tenants who had not been evicted had no open line of credit, like a credit card, compared with 61% of evicted tenants, in the 13 to 36 months following an eviction. Tenants in eviction court also have thousands of dollars more in debt — more than $3,000 in the 13 to 36 months after an eviction — compared with about $1,200 for a random sample of people from the same neighborhood.

Still, despite reduced access to credit and higher debt, the authors write that “while we find small causal effects on financial health and larger effects on access to credit, the results are much more moderate than the existing work on evictions. Moreover, both evicted and non-evicted households face increasing financial distress more than two years before the eviction court case is filed.”

The authors also note they “cannot directly speak to the effectiveness of policies targeting populations at risk of eviction, such as emergency relief funds, or assistance programs for recently evicted tenants.”

Government Assistance Protects Low‐Income Families from Eviction
Ian Lundberg, Sarah Gold, Louis Donnelly, Jeanne Brooks‐Gunn and Sara McLanahan. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, June 2020.

In this paper, “government assistance” means public housing. The authors use data from Princeton and Columbia University’s Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which followed families of children born from 1998 to 2000 in large U.S. cities and surveyed them when the children were 1, 3, 5, 9 and 15 years old. Their parents were more likely to be unmarried, “producing a large sample of urban families at especially high risk of both housing assistance and eviction.”

The final sample included about 1,300 children. The authors estimate children in the sample who lived in public housing by age 9 were 8 percentage points less likely to have experienced eviction by age 15.

“For policymakers who view eviction as only one of many outcomes of interest, the implications of our results should be taken in the context of research on the effects of public housing on other outcomes,” the authors write. “Expansion of public housing may produce unwanted side effects, such as increases in income segregation or reductions in quality as public housing falls into disrepair.”

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With cities and suburbs across the U.S. facing well-documented affordable housing shortages, researchers for years have studied how government planning standards affect housing costs.

Those studies often examine how planning and zoning decisions affect traffic noise, whether neighborhood amenities can be reached by foot and other factors that can make a home more or less valuable.

A new paper expands this body of research by considering the housing, schools, parks and other infrastructure that go unbuilt in favor of wide streets.

The U.S. has some of the widest streets in the world. In 20 of the most populous counties, the median residential street plus sidewalks is 50 feet wide, with the dollar value of land used for streets sometimes stretching into six figures, finds the research in The Journal of the American Planning Association.

Wide streets are less common in some other countries. Certain streets in Japan, for example, are much narrower. Developments in Tokyo since 1990 have average street widths of 16 feet, notes Adam Millard-Ball, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of the new paper.

“One of the best ways to alleviate the housing crisis is to build more housing,” he says. “To the extent that narrower streets allow developers to build more housing, that will address the No. 1 issue with housing right now.”

The median residential street in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is 50 feet wide, according to Millard-Ball’s sample of counties.

The median width of a residential street in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, which includes Cambridge, is 40 feet — the narrowest of the group.

The widest streets in the sample are in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago. There, the median residential street is nearly 65 feet wide.

The 50-foot standard

For urban planners, a street is called a right of way. The paved section is the roadway.

A right of way includes the roadway as well as sidewalks, if any, along with space for drainage, utility poles and other public infrastructure. It’s the land usually owned by a city or county that the public has the right to use and make its way through by car, bicycle, foot or other mode. Neighbors waving hello across the sidewalk’s edge of their properties are waving across the right of way.

The median 50-foot right of way Millard-Ball documents stems from nearly a century of history in U.S. planning. After the home mortgage system collapsed during the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in and established the Federal Housing Administration in 1934.

The agency’s mortgage insurance and financial assistance for homebuyers represented “the most ambitious suburbanization plan in United States history,” write Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph in a 1995 Journal of the American Planning Association article that reviews the historical rise of U.S. suburbs.

To protect the government’s unprecedented investment in home ownership, mostly for white Americans, developers had to have detailed plans approved by the agency. The agency encouraged cul-de-sacs for new developments and favored plans that discouraged through traffic.

“Moreover, the FHA, unlike other planning agencies, was largely run by representatives of real estate and banking, so developers felt that its intervention protected their interests,” Southworth and Ben-Joseph write.

If developers wanted to build homes that would benefit from federal financial backing, rights of way had to be at least 50 feet wide, Millard-Ball explains in his new paper, “The Width and Value of Residential Streets.”

Six-figure values

To understand the value of land used for streets, Millard-Ball draws on research from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that estimates the value of quarter-acre lots zoned for single-family homes across the country. The value of the land used for streets can be substantial in places where low population density and high housing costs converge.

Santa Clara, California, which includes San Jose, has the most valuable streets in the sample at $146,000 per tax parcel. That’s roughly 40% of the median price of an existing single-family home sold in the U.S. in April 2021, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.

“One of the best ways to alleviate the housing crisis is to build more housing. To the extent that narrower streets allow developers to build more housing, that will address the No. 1 issue with housing right now.”

Adam Millard-Ball, UCLA

New York City, by contrast, has high housing costs but also high density — large apartment buildings are common. Tens of thousands of people live within each square mile. The land beneath streets in Queens, for example, is worth $36,000 per parcel.

At the other end of the value spectrum, streets are worth $7,000 per parcel in Bexar County, Texas, which includes San Antonio. But land values and street widths can vary greatly within counties.

Terra Vista, a small street in a subdivision 25 miles north of San Antonio, is 52 feet wide and has a land value of $43,288 per parcel. All the land under residential streets in Millard-Ball’s 20 counties is worth nearly $1 trillion in total.

Millard-Ball notes that street land value estimates per parcel are likely low for high-cost, dense cities, which often zone for multifamily buildings over single-family homes.

For example, an Italian specialty food store in the Mission District of San Francisco sold its parking lot for $3 million in 2018 — roughly $36 million per acre, by Millard-Ball’s calculation — to make way for a five-story, 18-unit building, according to the news site Mission Local.

Click to explore the value of land used for streets in 20 of the largest U.S. counties.

Most U.S. counties regulate how and where new housing and business developments are built, according to the National Association of Counties, a nonprofit organization that represents U.S. county governments.

Many large cities do the same.

It would be overly costly for cities and counties to change the width of existing streets, particularly with local governments facing budget shortfalls during the pandemic.

Still, the estimates in the new paper can be instructive for planning officials in places like Bexar, one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S., as they permit developments to accommodate new and current residents.  

“The values are an indication that cities should be making it easier to use streets for something other than roadways and parking,” Millard-Ball says. “A good analogy is that during COVID, one use of streets has been for outdoor dining. It’s recognition that this land is more valuable to the community if we can use it for people to get together and eat in a safer environment outdoors, than as a parking space or travel lane for cars.”

He continues: “The point is that desolate asphalt is doing nobody any good — not the city, not property owners, not anyone. Cities are often keen to widen the right of way with new developments. Say you want to develop a new apartment building. Often, the city will say, ‘Sure, but you have to give up some land so we can add a turn lane, or widen the sidewalk.’ If cities can widen the right of way, why can’t they narrow it in exchange for improvements that will benefit the public?”

Indeed, when a new residential building goes up, cities commonly require developers to widen streets, according to a 2017 paper in the Journal of Transport and Land Use by Michael Manville, another UCLA urban planner.

In the paper, Manville looked at how the requirement played out in Los Angeles from 2002 to 2012. He finds the city’s predictions of increased traffic with the arrival of new buildings were often wrong, and “the standards the law is based on are in some ways unverifiable. Thus the law likely does little to reduce congestion and probably impedes housing development.”

Flexible design

City and county planning standards vary and change, but the federal 50-foot standard still often dominates residential street design. Still, it’s not always true that counties with more land to expand, like those in Texas, have wider streets. Dallas County, for example, specifies that new residential streets in subdivisions be at least 50 feet wide. The median width of residential streets there is exactly 50 feet, Millard-Ball finds.

Residential streets in Chicago, meanwhile, are typically 66 feet wide, according to city design standards. That roughly matches the length of the typical surveyor’s chain as the city grew throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. The surveyor’s chain was a tool made up of interlocking metal bars that land surveyors used to measure and mark the shapes of streets to be built.

Uniformity in street design made sense as the nation was expanding and infrastructure technologies were less advanced. But the takeaway for Millard-Ball is that maintaining rigidity in street design means fewer amenities and, potentially, less housing.

He wonders, for example, whether more streets could be built with parking cutouts only where there are no private driveways — providing a unique residential landscape alongside opportunities to use more of the built environment for activities other than driving.  

“That would make construction drawings more complex,” Millard-Ball says. “The tradeoff is visual interest — and saving a lot of valuable land.”

The prospect of narrower streets raises the question of whether emergency vehicles would be able to pass, though some planners, and at least one report from the U.S. Department of Transportation, suggest smaller emergency vehicles could be an answer.

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Income inequality drives hundreds of people into homelessness on any given night in dozens of communities across the U.S., finds new research in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

A community of 740,000 people where income disparities have risen sharply over the past decade can expect over 550 additional people to experience homelessness on a given night, the researchers report in their paper, “A Rising Tide Drowns Unstable Boats: How Inequality Creates Homelessness.”

The findings may not surprise residents of expensive cities like New York, where, according to federal data, 13% of the nation’s homeless population lives. West coast cities with high housing costs, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, also have well-documented homelessness crises.

The new research is among the first to parse the specific ways income inequality affects homelessness at the local level.

“Ultimately, income inequality is pricing lower-income households out of housing markets,” says lead author Thomas Byrne, an assistant professor at Boston University who studies housing.

Income inequality refers to the earnings gap separating those who earn the most money and those who earn least. Income is separate from wealth, which is accrued through stock market investments, real estate and other avenues apart from wages earned for work and other taxable income.

The value of an owned home doesn’t count as income. Neither do noncash public aid benefits, like supplemental nutrition cards and housing subsidies.

Imperfect data on homelessness

Roughly 580,000 people experience homelessness in the U.S., according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2020 annual report to Congress.

National homelessness figures are imprecise because they’re based on an annual count taken on a single night in late January. A homeless person is someone who “lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to the report.

About 60% of counted homeless people are in shelters while 40% are unsheltered and living, for example, on the street, in a park, vehicle or abandoned building.

“Rent is getting too high to live,” one Seattle renter said in 2017, responding to a survey from the city’s Seattle Women’s Commission and the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice Project, which offers free legal help to local renters facing eviction.

While the overall count of homeless people is down 10% since the federal agency’s first count in 2007, the authors of the new paper note rising homelessness in some large communities has driven upticks in the national tally since 2016.

HUD counts homeless people living within nearly 400 geographies known as continuums of care. It’s easiest to think of a continuum of care as a network of service providers, including nonprofit organizations and government agencies, addressing issues of homelessness within and sometimes across regions. Staff at those providers, as well as local volunteers, conduct the annual one-night count.

Some cities, like New York and St. Louis, are their own continuums of care. For other places, like Denver, the continuum of care includes the metropolitan area. In less densely populated areas — Montana, North Dakota and Delaware, for example — a whole state might be a continuum of care.

HUD’s data is flawed in other ways. Academic researchers have noted the agency doesn’t report measures of uncertainty, such as error margins, and that some people without homes are not included in the homelessness count because it happens only one night.

Still, it’s the most comprehensive current data available on homelessness in the U.S., and it is regularly used in research on housing and homelessness.

Unequal growth in inequality

The authors of the new paper estimate a Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of income distribution, for 239 continuums of care from 2007 to 2018. Those communities accounted for 77% of people experiencing homelessness on any given night in 2018.

The authors exclude communities with fewer than 65,000 people because recent yearly Census Bureau estimates on median household income, median rent and other factors associated with homelessness are not available for smaller communities.

The Gini coefficient often is expressed on a scoring scale of 0 to 100. A score closer to 0 indicates less inequality, while a score closer to 100 means more inequality.

The national Gini coefficient closely tracks with the share of income the top 10% of earners take home, according to the authors.

The average Gini score was 44 across all years and communities studied.

Income inequality increased 0.37 points, about 1%, over the decade studied, but varied widely for individual communities. About one-third of communities saw their estimated Gini score increase by more than one point, over twice the average rate of growth for the communities studied.

Bigger cities and their surrounding areas that experienced a relatively larger increase in income inequality include Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

Smaller communities in the same category include Amarillo, Texas; Burlington, Vermont; Camden, New Jersey; Chico, California; DeKalb, Illinois; Lakeland, Florida; Portsmouth, Virginia; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Utica, New York; and Worcester, Massachusetts.

The full list is available here.

The average community in the authors’ dataset had a population of 740,000 — roughly the size of Seattle.

For a community that size, a one point increase in the Gini score is associated with 562 additional people not having a home on any given night, the researchers find.

‘We can make a lasting impact’

The American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed into law March 11, includes $5 billion in grants to help state and local governments reduce homelessness.

The goal is to get “as many as 130,000 people off the streets” over the next 12 to 18 months, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said during a March 18 press briefing.

“If we’re strategic about how those funds are used, we can make a lasting impact,” Byrne says.

His new paper, written with University of Southern California associate professor Benjamin Henwood and California State Polytechnic University assistant professor Anthony Orlando, could be instructive.

The authors examine two ways income inequality might drive homelessness.

The first has to do with what people spend on housing.

Housing supply typically can’t keep up with housing demand in cities. There’s “an urban renaissance,” Orlando wrote in his 2018 doctoral dissertation, “and housing is not being built fast enough.” Zoning and land-use regulations are two big reasons housing supply can’t keep up.

What happens when housing supply can’t keep up with demand? Prices go up.

That raises the odds that people who make less money will become housing-cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their pretax income on housing. Some people will pay more to stay in their homes, while higher prices will drive others out of their homes.

Housing researchers have noted limitations of the 30% threshold — though, from an analytical perspective, it is “a helpful way of establishing a binary relationship from which the research can then distinguish households who are cost-burdened from those who are not,” as the authors of a recent paper on rural housing burdens wrote.

The second way income inequality might drive homelessness has to do with the pace housing prices increase. Economically booming communities attract high-income, high-skill workers, who quickly drive up the price of housing, according to the authors.

Their analysis most strongly links rising income inequality with the housing-cost burden, rather than how fast housing prices rise, though the authors call this finding “tentative” and stress more research is needed.

Still, they write that “while many housing policy advocates focus on slowing the growth of housing prices, this strategy alone is unlikely to be sufficient in preventing homelessness. It is important to include policies that increase the ability of low-income households to afford housing — for example, increasing the minimum wage, public benefit levels, and the supply of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers.”

The authors further stress their findings “point to the importance of local, as distinct from national, inequality.”

But Byrne says there’s one thing the federal government could do to vastly reduce homelessness: make sure everyone who needs a housing choice voucher gets one.

Section 8, also known as the Housing Choice Voucher Program, is the federal government’s biggest effort to help people with low income rent safe housing. The program subsidizes 70% of monthly rent and utilities for families that make less than half the median income for the county or metropolitan area where they live.

While about 2.2 million households use federal housing choice vouchers, eligible households aren’t automatically enrolled, and about three-quarters of eligible households don’t use them.

One study of voucher program take-up looked at more than 69,000 households offered a voucher and found 48% used them. There are a variety of reasons, including landlords who won’t accept vouchers and not enough voucher supply.

“It seems trite to say, but homelessness is a problem rooted in affordability, and income inequality effectively makes it more difficult for individuals to afford housing,” Byrne says. “Helping them afford housing is a logical and sound response. The thing that would have the biggest impact on reducing homelessness would be to make Section 8 universally available to everyone who’s eligible.”

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Annually, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy awards the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to a stellar investigative report that has had a direct impact on government, politics and policy at the national, state or local levels. Six reporting teams were chosen as finalists for the 2020 prize, which carries a $10,000 award for finalists and $25,000 for the winner. This year, as we did last year, Journalist’s Resource is publishing a series of interviews with the finalists, in the interest of giving a behind-the-scenes explanation of the process, tools, and legwork it takes to create an important piece of investigative journalism. Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center, but was not involved in the judging process for the Goldsmith Prize finalists or winner.  “Copy, Paste, Legislate” — a collaboration among The Arizona Republic, USA TODAY and the Center for Public Integrity — was named the winner on March 23.

Despite multiple U.S. federal government agencies recommending that homes have functioning carbon monoxide detectors, a 2019  NBC News investigation found that federally funded housing was held to a lower standard.

Journalists Suzy Khimm and Laura Strickler analyzed thousands of pages of federal regulations to determine that carbon monoxide detectors were not required in any of the 4.6 million homes that receive federal rental subsidies from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

They also compiled and verified a national tally of carbon monoxide deaths in HUD housing, using lease documents, Freedom of Information Act requests for police reports and federal housing contracts, searches in HUD property databases, and interviews with retired housing officials and family members of the deceased. They found that at least 13 residents of HUD housing have died from carbon monoxide poisoning since 2003; carbon monoxide poising poses a higher risk to HUD housing residents than the general population.

The count was the first of its kind. Carbon monoxide deaths in federally funded housing were not being tracked by federal agencies, local housing authorities, academics or public health researchers.

After the first part of the investigation was published on March 1, 2019, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives took swift action in the following weeks, introducing bills to require carbon monoxide detectors in public housing. In April, HUD announced that it would draft a federal requirement for carbon monoxide detectors in public housing.

Khimm says she began the investigation on a tip from a source, who alerted her to two deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning that occurred in a South Carolina public housing complex.

“I’m based in DC, and I focus on investigating federal agencies and the impact that their policies have on ordinary people,” Khimm says. “The first question that occurred to me when I first heard about the carbon monoxide deaths in South Carolina: Was there an oversight failure that put these residents at risk? What are the federal protections? Are there any federal protections, surrounding carbon monoxide issues in federally assisted properties? What is the federal role in all this?

“A lot of people were asking questions, important questions, about the local oversight of the property for the local housing authority in South Carolina, their maintenance, their property management. But, at that point in time, no one was asking the questions about HUD, about the federal oversight of these properties. So that was really how this investigation got started.”

We asked Khimm over phone and email about how she and her reporting partner, Strickler, got the story. Khimm’s responses, which provide helpful suggestions and reporting tips for journalists, were edited for length and clarity.

Confirming the absence of something can be harder than confirming the presence of something.

“Sometimes in reporting, you’re not looking for the presence of something — you’re trying to confirm the absence of something. And sometimes that can be even more difficult, because we were basically trying to prove a negative; we were trying to prove that something doesn’t exist,” Khimm explains. “That really did take a lot of legwork. A lot of our prior knowledge, prior investigative reporting into housing inspection standards, really proved to be key in terms of learning how to decipher what HUD’s inspection regimen should have looked like with respect to carbon monoxide.

“The quality of a health and safety inspection begins with the underlying standards. What is really being measured? You have to examine the actual standards and protocol for conducting inspections. What about enforcement of those standards? If an inspector finds serious problems, what’s supposed to happen next — and what actually did happen next?

“The ownership, management and oversight of federally subsidized housing is really complex and opaque. Different types of properties are held to different federal health and safety standards depending on their financial structure and ownership — whether it’s traditional public housing or a privately owned property that accepts Section 8 vouchers, for instance. For each set of standards and inspection protocol, we homed in on the specific sections and subsection regarding air quality, regarding things like smoke detectors and the gas-fired appliances that can emit dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.

“… You do the initial reporting and deep dive into the research, then go back and confirm your findings with other documents and sources to understand what the health and safety standards are, how inspections actually work, and what inspectors are actually looking at. To help back up what we were finding, we looked at the actual inspection checklists and individual inspection reports, in order to examine the criteria that inspectors were actually using to gauge the health and safety of a federally subsidized home. And we talked to people actually doing this work in the field.”

When reporting on and evaluating government standards, compare them with other existing standards.

“In terms of thinking about standards, and how do you go about evaluating standards and especially standards for health and safety, whether or not they’re good enough or adequate — how do we answer that question?

“I think one way to go about doing that is to look at other examples.

“For example, there’s something called the International Fire Code, which a lot of not only countries, but individual states or municipalities, local governments, might use as a basis for their building codes.

“The International Fire Code requires carbon monoxide detectors for homes that have gas fired appliances, and there’s specific language that they use, specific things that they require. So that is one thing that that I looked at in terms of thinking about what could possibly be missing from federal regulations.

“The other thing that we found in our reporting was the fact that other government agencies, the major safety bodies of the U.S. government, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and HUD’s own Department of Healthy Homes, both of those bodies recommend carbon monoxide detectors. So in other words, the U.S. government itself recommends that all residents, regardless of whether you live in federally subsidized housing or not, install corporate monoxide detectors in the home. Yet the standards that HUD uses for some of the most vulnerable and poorest families in the country do not include that standard.”

Make multiple requests through different sources for the same documents.

“Every time I file a federal FOIA request, I always think about other ways in which I could get the same documents from somewhere else, because more likely than not, I will be able to get a faster response if I go outside the federal government than going to the federal government.

“If you’re looking for HUD records, that could mean going to the person who owns that property, so that could be a local housing authority, it could be a private landlord. There could be various other folks who’ve seen that information, and try to go through them. That could be going through local or state governments, which also tend to be more responsive and quicker than the federal government or could just be a private individual, people that you just have to find some way to appeal to and to talk to them.”

When trying to find specific information, consider all the forms it might take. And create Google Alerts. 

“I create Google Alerts for every project that I’m working on and keep checking them for weeks, months or even years later, just in case something pops up. I had a Google Alert for ‘carbon monoxide’ that pulled up any kind of related news stories.

“The couple that had died in Michigan, the initial local news on that did not say anything about them living in a federal assisted property. There was no mention of HUD, there was no mention that they had received rental subsidies, there was nothing there. There was also no mention of whether there were carbon monoxide detectors or not in their home.

“So basically, it took my going through their family and their lawyer and then going through the piles of legal documents and other financial paperwork and other things that the couple had left behind after they had died to determine whether or not they had actually received rental subsidies and that their unit was specifically under HUD’s oversight.”

…

“A lot of times, there might have been initial reports that there was a carbon monoxide incident. [But] it might not have been verified, at the time, that that was actually the cause of death. So it entailed us going to the coroner’s office, asking for and trying to confirm the cause of death, going through the local housing authority, asking them about this death that had happened years and years ago, what the residents’ names were, and then getting the details from the specific properties where these deaths might have happened.

“In some cases, we had to appeal to individual family members to confirm that their relatives had in fact been living in federally subsidized housing at the time of their death; there are privately owned properties that are subject to federal oversight and safety inspections, but which are not immediately identifiable as ‘public housing.’ This could be very challenging as family members did not always want to relive the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths; carbon monoxide poisoning typically happens very suddenly and without warning.

…

“It was a combination of shoe-leather reporting, digging through public records and looking through archives. Early on, we did an extensive Nexis search that provided clues to help guide our reporting into individual carbon monoxide incidents, but that was just the beginning of our process.

“I did a very broad canvas of folks in the advocacy world, in academia, at HUD, trying to see whether anyone was keeping track of these deaths. It turns out that they were not, but some of them did have some helpful leads into cases that they’d heard about in the past.”

Convey the potential impact of your reporting to reluctant sources, like family members of victims.

“I think it helps to be patient, to make an appeal without expecting an immediate response — telling folks, please take all the time you need to think about this, please discuss it with your family. Also, be willing to talk to them off the record or on background first, being open-ended about the form in which you are willing to talk to them.

…

“I do think it’s a mixture of just being respectful and tactful, but persistent, reaching out to folks, and also just being honest with them about why you’re doing this reporting, you know, why are you telling this story? What are the bigger questions you’re trying to answer? And why do they matter? And what are you hoping to get out of the story?”

Humanize a wonky story.

“When you’re reporting on something that involves a lot of bureaucracy, and confusing policy details and complex issues, I think that means that the storytelling piece is even more important.

…

“I think especially for these kinds of wonkier issues, I think it’s even more important to convey a sense of the community, the people being affected, a sense of the place and the human stakes. I think that was a really critical component for our story in terms of telling it in a compelling way that really explained the human impact of these federal policies.”

Realize the potential to nationalize a local story.

“One thing that has surprised me in terms of reporting on an agency like HUD and an issue like housing is how often social policies that affect some of the most vulnerable people in the country, and that have federal dollars and oversight attached to them, are treated as strictly local issues rather than national ones.

“If you can find the chain of accountability and follow that through as thoroughly as possible, that’s really important, whether you’re a local reporter or a national reporter.

“It’s another way of following the money — there are federal rules, regulations, and oversight that are often attached to federal funding. It’s really important and will make sure that everyone who is responsible for some degree of oversight is being actually held responsible.”

The post How they did it: Reporters investigate carbon monoxide deaths, regulations in HUD housing appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In August, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule critics say would make it harder for people to fight housing discrimination. The agency is proposing to change how it interprets the “disparate impact standard,” a legal principle used for decades in cases involving Fair Housing Act violations.

The FHA was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Numerous discriminatory housing cases have hinged on the disparate impact standard, which prohibits housing practices that lead to discrimination against a protected class — even if the discrimination isn’t intentional.

“Protected class” refers to groups that federal law protects from housing discrimination based on race, skin color, national origin, sex, religion, family status and disability. State and local laws may cover additional classes. They may protect, for example, renters and buyers from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

One widely cited hypothetical scenario involving the disparate impact standard is a landlord who screens out rental applicants with arrest records. This practice, though not necessarily intentionally discriminatory, could have a racially discriminatory effect because, “African Americans and Hispanics are arrested, convicted and incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their share of the general population,” according to HUD general counsel guidance from 2016.

Public comments on the proposed rule closed late last week. HUD received more than 3,800 comments. Critics say the proposed rule would make it nearly impossible for people to bring civil action using the disparate impact standard. Supporters say it would allow housing-related businesses to pursue their goals without undue concern that litigation based on disparate impact might be brought against them.

The number of comments reflects a high level of public interest and the proposed rule’s potential importance. By comparison, HUD sought public input on its Single-Family Loan Sale Program earlier this year and received 19 comments. In 2011, HUD issued a proposed rule — also on the disparate impact standard — and received just under 100 comments.

How would the proposed rule change HUD’s interpretation of the disparate impact standard?

HUD is a federal, cabinet-level agency founded in 1966 that, among other things, works to ensure fairness for people renting and buying housing. People can file complaints related to discriminatory housing practices through HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.

This is how a discriminatory effect in housing is established today. It’s what HUD calls its “three-part burden-shifting test.” Federal courts of appeal often use a similar test. The Supreme Court introduced the idea of burden shifting in a 1973 ruling, and HUD’s test is modeled after it:

• The plaintiff has to prove that a practice, such as screening rental applicants for arrest records, caused or will predictably cause discrimination.
• The defendant then has the opportunity to prove that the practice is serving some non-discriminatory and legitimate interest, such as ensuring the safety of an apartment building’s residents.
• Even if the defendant meets that burden of proof, the plaintiff can prevail if the defendant could achieve their legitimate goal through another practice that leads to less discrimination.

Civil legal action requires that charging parties provide some basic facts that the defendant can rebut. This is called prima facie evidence. “Prima facie” is Latin for “at first sight.” Different legal actions require different prima facie evidence for a case to move forward.

The current rule is simple and broad at the prima facie phase — the plaintiff needs to show that a housing practice caused or will predictably cause discrimination. Under the proposed rule, the plaintiff would instead need to first allege something more specific — that the practice is “arbitrary, artificial and unnecessary” toward meeting a legitimate interest.

“HUD recognizes that plaintiffs will not always know what legitimate objective the defendant will assert in response to the plaintiff’s claim or how the policy advances that interest, and, in such cases, will not be able to plead specific facts showing why the policy or practice is arbitrary, artificial, and unnecessary,” writes Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Anna Maria Farías in the proposed rule. “In such cases, a pleading plausibly alleging that a policy or practice advances no obvious legitimate objective would be sufficient to meet this pleading requirement.”

In other words, if a housing policy or practice has no obvious goal that is enough to pass the “arbitrary, artificial and unnecessary” test. The burden would then shift to the defendant to show the policy or practice serves a valid interest. After the defendant has their say, burden shifts to the plaintiff, who must show that:

• There is a “robust causal link” between a practice and disparate impact on a protected class.
  • HUD doesn’t precisely define “robust causal link,” but in its proposed rule the agency asks for comment on whether it should define that and other terms.
• The practice does indeed have a discriminatory effect on a protected class.
• The disparate impact is “significant” and not due to chance.
• The alleged discrimination is directly caused by the practice.

The plaintiff would have to show each of the above by a preponderance of the evidence. That means before the case goes to discovery, the fact finder — the person or people who decide whether a case should move forward — would have to be convinced there is a better than 50% chance each of the above is true.

Discovery is an important phase in litigation. It is when sides may take depositions and compel parties to provide documents and other information.

Getting to discovery means access to a potential wealth of evidence.

One other important change the proposed rule would make: a defendant can defeat a claim if unintentional discrimination is happening because of an algorithm that a “recognized third party, not the defendant, is responsible for creating or maintaining.” Farías explains in the proposed rule this is meant to allow defendants to stage a defense arguing the algorithm is an industry standard.

If the plaintiff were to win a case against a defendant using an unintentionally discriminatory third-party algorithm, the algorithm would only be removed from use “by one party, whereas suing the party that is actually responsible for the creation and design of the model would remove the disparate impact from the industry as a whole,” Farías writes. “A plaintiff may rebut this allegation by showing that the plaintiff is not challenging the standard model alone, but the defendant’s unique use or misuse of the model, as the cause of the disparate impact.”

Why did HUD propose this change?

Since the early 1990s, HUD has used the disparate impact standard to adjudicate housing discrimination charges, and 11 federal courts of appeal have agreed with the standard. But HUD only formalized its use of the disparate impact standard in a final rule from 2013. This is also the rule in which HUD codified its three-part burden-shifting test. Federal agency rules are often revisited after new presidential administrations and political appointees take office.

In its proposed rule from August, HUD heavily cites the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. The Inclusive Communities Project, a fair housing nonprofit, alleged the state was doling out federal tax credits for affordable housing projects mostly in neighborhoods that were largely made up of racial and ethnic minorities, particularly in Dallas. According to the Inclusive Communities Project, this meant minorities were denied the chance to live in predominantly white neighborhoods — perpetuating housing segregation.

In the 2015 Inclusive Communities case, the highest court in the country affirmed that the disparate impact standard was legally viable, or “cognizable” in legal parlance. After Inclusive Communities, the disparate impact standard effectively became the law of the land.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, stressed that businesses need to be able to make practical decisions without being overly concerned that those decisions might lead to legal liability under the disparate impact standard.

Kennedy, who retired in 2018, further clarified that a “robust causality requirement is important” to ensure defendants do not resort to racial quotas to avoid actual or potential discrimination. “Remedial orders that impose racial targets or quotas might raise difficult constitutional questions,” Kennedy writes. The Supreme Court has tackled racial quotas in several other cases, perhaps most notably in cases related to higher education. For example, the court barred racial quotas for college admissions in the landmark 1978 affirmative action case Regents of University of California v. Bakke.

According to HUD, the proposed rule brings the agency’s approach to the disparate impact standard in line with the Supreme Court’s Inclusive Communities decision.

Farías writes: “The Court placed special emphasis on the importance of the plaintiff’s prima facie burden, warning that, ‘[w]ithout adequate safeguards at the prima facie stage, disparate-impact liability might cause race to be used and considered in a pervasive way and would almost inexorably lead governmental or private entities to use numerical quotas, and serious constitutional questions then could arise.’”

What do critics say?

Critics of the proposed rule include members of the general public, elected officials and fair housing advocates. In their comments, critics argue that the proposed rule would make it difficult for people to file discriminatory housing claims based on the disparate impact standard.

“HUD’s proposal represents a major step backward because it would render the disparate impact standard a dead letter,” comments Ugochi Anaebere-Nicholson, directing attorney of the Public Law Center, which provides free legal representation to low-income residents in Orange County, California. “It would increase the standard for bringing a disparate impact suit to the point that it would become, in practice, close to impossible to do so.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois offers that, “the burden of proof to find a new business policy that is just as profitable as the alleged discriminatory practice falls on the victim to find. This creates a rigged system victims face by requiring them to guess the justifications a defendant might use and preemptively discredit them.”

Others, such as Clarence Stone, director of legal affairs at the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, argue that the Inclusive Communities decision does not imply or state that HUD should change its interpretation: “It is not apparent from Inclusive Communities that the majority ruling contained any criticism of the 2013 rule. Further, there does not appear to be legal support within Justice Kennedy’s opinion for certain elements in HUD’s new burden-shifting framework.”

Many comments are specifically critical of the portion of the proposed rule that would negate cases of discrimination caused by a third-party algorithm.

“The proposed defenses would create a loop-hole for banks/lenders to hide behind third-party vendors and their standard practice or used as intended model,” writes Angela Fernandez, commissioner of the New York State Division of Human Rights. “If the bank/lender is not held liable for discriminatory outcomes from an algorithm the third-party uses, then they will not have any incentive to look for a third-party that guarantees its algorithms do not discriminate.”

What do supporters say?

Supporters include other members of the general public, federal government officials and insurance industry representatives. They say the proposed rule would ease legal burdens on businesses and clarify the evidence needed to bring housing discrimination suits based on disparate impact. Another benefit, according to supporters, is that the proposed rule would avoid the possibility that a defendant might resort to using racial quotas.

Here’s that perspective in a nutshell from Tom Quaadman, an executive vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group that is not part of the U.S. government:

“Uncertainty about the availability of disparate impact claims under the FHA and the contours of any such liability make it challenging for companies to understand their compliance obligations in this context. Varying regulatory and judicial interpretations of the FHA, and related statutes, further complicate these efforts. At the same time, companies have to manage the risk of unintentionally adopting quotas in the name of avoiding disparities. Adding to these challenges, companies face the threat of litigation based on indeterminate disparate impact theories. Such litigation poses reputational risk even if it is ultimately proven to have not been at fault. As a result, companies often decide to avoid undertaking beneficial new projects, offering valuable features, or developing innovative products out of fear of later being second-guessed under a disparate impact theory.”

Christopher Koback echoes some of the above, writing that the proposed rule “discourages ‘abusive’ disparate impact claims while preserving cases that are at the core of disparate impact liability.” Koback is president of the Bay Area Apartment Association, which represents landlords and property managers in Tampa Bay.

A 2017 Treasury Department report that Farías cites captures insurance industry concerns related to the 2013 HUD final rule — which, again, formalized the agency’s use of the disparate impact standard and the three-part burden-shifting test.

The 2017 Treasury report says the disparate impact standard, when applied to things like homeowner’s insurance, could lead insurers to collect and evaluate data on protected classes. That could conflict with state regulations and at least one state law against such detailed analysis of data on protected classes — and insurance companies usually can’t consider factors like race in developing their products.

The report also says that if insurers were forced to address insurance practices that aren’t intended to discriminate but discriminate nonetheless, they might have to adopt practices that are not actuarially sound, though Treasury doesn’t explicitly say why.

Sidebar: Actuarial soundness

Actuaries use data to predict risk and help insurance companies set prices for policies. The phrase “actuarially sound” can be nebulous, even to experts. A 2012 report from the American Academy of Actuaries could not identify a concise definition of “actuarially sound” in relation to property insurance.

But some clarity can be found by following the crumbs in the Treasury’s 2017 report.

That report cites a 2014 ruling from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia as evidence that “the rule could also impose unnecessary burdens on insurers and force them to alter practices in a manner that may not be actuarially sound.”

That ruling, in turn, relies on an affidavit from an insurance industry professional and a 2009 white paper from the Casualty Actuarial Society, a global organization that accredits actuaries.

That white paper describes “actuarially sound” like this, which it cribs from the CAS Statement of Ratemaking Principles from 1988:

“A rate is reasonable and not excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory if it is an actuarially sound estimate of the expected value of all future costs associated with an individual risk transfer.”

So, it might be said that an “actuarially sound” insurance policy is one with a risk assessment based on neutral data that anticipate costs. Actuaries base their risk assessments on statistical models that account for risks that might affect an insurance policy. For example, in an area that regularly gets tornadoes, certain roof designs may make some homes more prone to catastrophic damage than others.

Any assessment that is not cost-based is anathema to actuaries — and disparate impact “is not a cost-based concept,” according to that 2009 white paper. “If applied to insurance, a risk/rate factor will potentially be said to have a disparate impact if it more adversely impacts a protected minority class than it does the majority class, regardless of its relationship to underlying costs.”

A group of insurance trade associations further lay out the conflict they see between the disparate impact standard and actuarial soundness in a brief filed for Inclusive Communities:

“Where a particular practice would give rise to a disparate impact, insurers would have to forgo considering factors that correlate to risk, or to differentiate among insureds on the basis of factors that do not correlate to risk, in violation of sound actuarial principles.”

Tornado watch at Hip Hills and Gable Gardens

Here’s a simplified hypothetical to help explain this perspective:

Hip roofs are more wind resistant than gable roofs, according to research from the National Wind Institute at Texas Tech University. Hip roofs have four sloping sides. Gable roofs usually have two sides and an A-shape.

Say there are two subdivisions near each other in a tornado-prone area. Homes in both subdivisions are all worth about the same. We’ll call one subdivision Hip Hills because the homes in it have hip roofs. The other we’ll call Gable Gardens, because the homes there have gable roofs.

An insurance company in the area is selling coverage that would reimburse homeowners for catastrophic tornado damage. State law says homeowner’s insurance policies have to be actuarially sound. Among other risk factors, actuaries at the insurance company account for roof design. Insurance policies end up costing more for people in Gable Gardens because their homes can’t hold up to wind as well as homes in Hip Hills.

Gable Gardens also happens to be a subdivision where people predominately practice one religion — while people in Hip Hills predominately practice another religion. Someone in Gable Gardens might file a disparate impact claim with HUD alleging that even though the insurance company isn’t trying to discriminate, it is discriminating because members of their religion end up paying more for the same level of coverage.

Removing roof design from the actuarial equation might lower premiums for people in Gable Gardens, and eliminate the discriminatory effect. But those premiums wouldn’t accurately reflect the costs of providing the insurance, considering claims there are likely going to be higher. From the insurance company’s perspective, those rates wouldn’t be actuarially sound, and might not be allowed under state regulations. The core concern for insurance companies is that adding or removing calculations for reasons that don’t have to do with risk would upset actuarial soundness — and could affect their bottom line.

Actuarial soundness is part and parcel with insurance companies’ profit motive.

“Insurers make actuarially based decisions that are associated with risks of future losses,” the insurance associations write in the Inclusive Communities brief, in which they argue that disparate impact claims should not be allowed in cases where otherwise neutral insurance practices result in discrimination. “An insurer’s profitability, ability to offer insurance to customers going forward, and very solvency depend on its ability to match price with risk.”

It bears reminder that under HUD’s current three-part burden-shifting test, “insurance practices that have a disparate impact on protected groups are generally permissible if no less discriminatory alternative is available,” according to a 2017 paper from the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

As in the tornado alley example above, some states do require that certain property insurance rates be actuarially sound. An insurance company may not be able to sell insurance in those states if its rates are not actuarially sound. What Treasury is saying in its report, and what HUD is saying in its proposed rule, is that the disparate impact standard — as HUD interprets it today — could force insurance companies to pursue business decisions that would threaten their existence.

The proposed HUD rule, the 2017 Treasury report and the insurance associations’ Inclusive Communities brief all deal in legal hypotheticals. None provide examples of or allude to insurance companies pursuing actuarially unsound practices in real life due to the 2013 HUD final rule.

Neither has the property and casualty insurance industry writ large appear to have suddenly started operating at a loss. The industry wrote $613 billion worth of premiums and netted $60 billion in income after taxes in 2018, compared to $497 billion in premiums and $56 billion in net income in 2014, according to data from ISO, an insurance data provider. Net income after taxes for the industry was lower in 2012, at $35 billion. There are many factors that can affect net income. A particular year may see more hurricanes and wildfires and floods, running claims higher. But there was no obvious seismic drop in net income following HUD’s 2013 rule, as far as the entire property and casualty insurance industry is concerned.

State regulation over federal legislation

HUD wrote in 2016 that the insurance industry’s issues would be best addressed on a case-by-case basis. Any blanket exemption or “safe harbor” for insurance companies from the disparate impact standard would be “inconsistent with the broad fair housing objectives and obligations embodied in the [Fair Housing] Act,” the agency asserted then.

HUD now proposes to add language explicitly saying that the FHA would not apply to situations where it would “invalidate, impair, or supersede” state insurance regulations. “Under these circumstances, the state insurance law governs,” Farías writes. She continues that this language, “does not provide the safe harbor for insurance,” but, “would have a similar effect to a safe harbor, in appropriate circumstances.”

For example, the circumstance cited elsewhere in the HUD proposed rule — and in the 2017 Treasury report, and in the insurance associations’ Inclusive Communities brief — in which an insurance company is sued under disparate impact despite trying to comply in good faith with state regulations. HUD also seeks to affirm that “case-by-case adjudication” is the proper way to handle such situations. What is new is the explicit language that state insurance regulations would supersede federal civil rights legislation, language HUD says is consistent with the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This act delegates federal regulatory and taxation authority over insurance business to the states. The insurance associations also lean heavily on McCarran-Ferguson in their Inclusive Communities brief.

What’s next?

HUD may issue a final rule that would codify its new interpretation of the disparate impact standard. The final rule would be just that — a final rule. It would broadly describe the public comments related to the proposed rule and, to some degree, it would take those comments into account. It might end up looking different from the proposed rule. A final rule would be HUD’s last word under the current administration as to how it interprets the disparate impact standard.

It’s unclear when a final rule might be published, given that HUD staff have an inordinate number of comments to sift through. The 2013 HUD final rule on the disparate impact standard came 15 months after the proposed rule, which had roughly 100 comments.

The post How a proposed HUD rule would make it harder to file some housing discrimination claims appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Lagging home values and high foreclosure rates among Hispanics, one of the nation’s largest voting blocs, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election in Florida, a new study finds.

The analysis, which looks at how homeownership affected the election, offers fresh insights into the habits of Hispanic voters. Sociologist Jacob Rugh examined the voting patterns of Florida homeowners who took out mortgage loans between 2005 and 2007 — the first few years of the nationwide housing crisis that prompted the most recent economic recession.

Rugh finds that Hispanics were much more likely than white or black homeowners to enter foreclosure and end up underwater on their home mortgages, owing more than than their properties were worth. By 2016, half of the Hispanic borrowers he studied had entered foreclosure. Nearly 70% were underwater on their mortgages.

The financial strain seems to have impacted Hispanic groups differently, however. Hispanic Democrats and independents who had lost homes or home equity were less likely to vote in 2016, compared with Hispanic Democrats and independents who did not experience such losses, according to the study, “Vanishing Wealth, Vanishing Votes? Latino Homeownership and the 2016 Election in Florida.” Hispanic Republicans, on the other hand, showed up at the polls, regardless of any lost wealth.

“The housing crisis made Latino Democrats and independents stay home,” explains Rugh, an associate professor at Brigham Young University.

There could be a host of reasons why these voters skipped the election, he says. For example, some might have moved and were missed by voter turnout efforts. After losing their homes to foreclosure, some may have become renters, who generally are less likely to vote. Rugh says some of these voters might have lost trust in public institutions such as elections after facing potential discrimination in the housing market.

Rugh initially studied homeowners in the Orlando region, examining 11,377 home mortgage loans recorded in Orange County, Florida. He matched them with voter registration data from December 2015 as well as 2016 election reports. After expanding his scope, Rugh found the same voter behavior patterns at the state level.

The share of Hispanics who voted Republican was larger in 2016 than it had been in 2012 while the share of Hispanics who voted as Democrats or independents fell — helping shift Florida from a blue state in 2012 to a red one in 2016.

While Florida’s housing challenges may have affected white voters differently than Hispanic voters, those challenges seem to have also prompted a greater share of white voters to choose Republican candidates. “In contrast to the pattern among Latinos, a lagging housing recovery may have potentially led more White voters to vote or switch their vote to the Republican candidate,” Rugh writes in the paper.

He points out that his findings are “consistent with other research that finds White voters who perceived themselves to be left behind in the economic recovery were more likely to vote for the Republican candidate, including White Democrats who switched votes from 2012 to 2016.”

Florida’s 2016 presidential and gubernatorial elections were close. About 4.5 million voters picked Hillary Clinton for president while 4.6 million selected Trump, according to the official vote count from the Federal Election Commission. Meanwhile, Republican Ron DeSantis won the governor’s seat with 49.6% of the vote. His Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, received 49.2%.

Rugh says his research has implications for Hispanic political engagement in future elections, especially in parts of the country that are like Florida, which was hit hard by the housing crisis and has been slow to recover. The researcher says he examined data from Nevada as part of a separate project and found that many Hispanic Democrats and independents there who lost homes through foreclosure or had underwater mortgages also skipped voting in 2016.

He notes that Florida Hispanics’ voting patterns in the 2018 general election mirrored those from 2016. He expects the same for the 2020 election.

“In terms of 2020, these [voting] differences in a place like Florida seem to explain why Republicans do better than expected,” he says.

To prepare for that election, Rugh suggests journalists start asking candidates about their efforts to address voter concerns about housing and homeownership. Candidates who speak to Hispanic voters about these issues “could probably do better with having them turn out,” he says. “It can’t always be about immigration, given the size of the Puerto Rican and Cuban American population who are native-born U.S. citizens.”

Rugh says journalists also should look into whether community organizations are working to help residents overcome housing problems as a way to encourage them to participate in local elections.

Reading his study, forthcoming in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, might generate other story ideas. Here are some other key takeaways:

• Among Florida Hispanics, those who are legal permanent residents of the United States and have passports were least vulnerable to home foreclosure. “Analyses confirm that Latinos with undocumented identification are by far the most vulnerable,” Rugh writes.
• Hispanic Republicans seem to behave more like white Republicans than other Hispanics. As the Hispanic population in the U.S. grows, this “holds important racial and electoral implications.”
• “Results from 2016 and 2018 strongly suggest that a more entrenched pattern of partisanship has taken hold among Florida voters, including Latinos,” Rugh writes. “In Florida, there are relatively few Mexican origin Latinos, yet a disproportionately higher share of Puerto Ricans (more Democratic yet less active), and Cubans and South Americans (more Republican and more active). This mix of Latino nationalities, partisanship, and voter activity … informs the future of elections elsewhere because the century-long wave of Mexican immigration is over and the U.S. Latino population is becoming more native born and less Mexican with each passing year.”

Looking for more research on Hispanic voters? Check out our write-ups on voter identification laws, Spanish-language election materials and minority voting districts. 

This image was obtained from the Flickr account of Jeff Turner and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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