“More than 50% of my tenants pay their rent by money order that they deliver in person. Our collections are way down for the past two months.”

“Residents in seven of our eight buildings have died from COVID.”

“We shut down the Wi-Fi in the common areas of the building because we did not want tenants congregating there.”

These statements are from three high-performing affordable housing portfolio owners.

COVID has created great urgency for housing providers to rethink the connection between housing and health. The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of the current housing operating system—fragile for tenants, who are struggling to socially distance and access online resources; fragile for owners, who are struggling to operate remotely and collect rent; fragile for our economy, which needs healthy workers who have a place to be safe but still engage in everyday activities.

We have two essential problems that we need to solve for immediately.

First, housing has been working in the equivalent of analog mode in a digital world. While it gets the job done, it is slow, it is clunky, and it is hard to adapt to changing conditions. It is time for an upgrade to a digitally driven approach that enables remote engagement for staff and residents; collects, stores, and transacts all information online; and has resiliency baked into its DNA, allowing for adaptability under changing conditions, greater accountability, and most importantly, better health security for the residents.

Second, most housing places lots of people in a dense space that is shared or “common.” Density has desirable qualities: It makes housing more affordable, it places people closer to jobs, and it mitigates climate change. But, in the face of COVID-19 and future health threats, we must change how we design and operate housing to keep residents and staff safe and healthy, applying a whole new set of standards that were never before on the radar, and that recognize that we need to make a large investment in housing as infrastructure and housing as a vaccine for personal and community health, and for economic mobility and viability.

Providing a health-secure environment cannot be achieved without taking these two critical steps—the current playbook will not get us there.

As we wait for a COVID vaccine to be generated and distributed, we will likely continue to operate under the current conditions of semi-quarantine, uncertainty, and stress through the end of 2020, and it is not inconceivable that we will still be dealing with COVID well into 2021. Regardless of the state of COVID-specific risk, this crisis has exposed our vulnerability to viruses. We need to restructure multifamily housing to better protect people and properties and make them both more resilient.

Multifamily owners now face an array of challenges that have no quick fixes. They have residents who cannot pay rent because they have lost jobs (maybe permanently). They have staff who cannot get to work because of illness or public transportation disruptions or care responsibilities for children now at home. Owners have obligations to investors and regulatory requirements that may be impossible to meet and they face a looming liability exposure. Make a misstep because something was not cleaned properly, someone’s health status was improperly shared, or financial payments were not made on time, and the lawyers will be calling.

So, housing needs a new operating system (OS) that is fully digitally enabled and benefits from wireless communications, remote sensors, mobile and cloud computing, digital signature and bio-verification, and other technologies that are compatible with increasing health security in a new housing environment. Specifically, the new housing OS will support the following critical functions that will make it resilient to the new normal of post-COVID:

  • Enable ingress and egress to buildings and congregating in common areas in a way that makes people feel safe and protected, including the ability to sanitize oneself and monitor vital signs, which will require redesign and retrofit. The new rules of the road must be understood and practiced by residents and staff and supported by some form of monitoring.
  • Remotely monitor all aspects of a property and remotely provide real time machine-assisted and human-assisted service to residents. This will require the installation of IOT equipment including sensors for monitoring building systems and integration with remote response systems.
  • Provide residents and staff at the property access to high-speed Wi-Fi from anywhere within the property, including the units, at no additional charge. Connectivity is now as much a lifeline as running water, electricity, and heat. This will require the installation of managed Wi-Fi or equivalent solutions that have the capacity to handle the building infrastructure reporting, as well as streaming-level bandwidth needed for at-home educating, working, telehealth, and socializing.
  • Shift rent collections to electronic payments for all residents. This requires providing those that are unbanked with bank accounts and those without an Internet device a device.
  • Facilitate delivery of packages, food, medications, and other essential items in a safe way, especially when in stay-at-home lockdown. This requires new policies and procedures for how external parties access the building and how tenants are notified.
  • Enable units to be shown without staff assistance, applications to be submitted electronically, and move-ins to occur without any on-site staff direct involvement. This involves shifting to digital locks and moving all application processes online facilitated by digital signatures.
  • Connect residents to community resources that support their critical needs. This involves becoming a partner with and supporting the tenant, applying staff time to creating alignment with the tenant that supports them to be healthy and have access to food, public assistance, education resources, employment opportunities, health care, and anything else that enables them to meet their rent obligations and be an engaged member of the community.
  • Provide staff and residents with personal protective equipment and some basic necessities on an as-needed basis. This requires maintaining an inventory of masks, gloves, sanitizer, toilet paper, and disinfectant wipes on site and accessible.

Housing owners might say, “Wait, my job is to provide housing as inexpensively and abundantly as possible, which is already hard enough. And, now you want me to do this? No thank you.” Or, they might say “the world will go back to the way it was pre-COVID and the way we were running things was working pretty well.”

But the die has been cast. The world has changed, and lives are at stake. Housing needs to reboot and adopt a new digitally driven operating system to house low-income people in a way that enhances their health security and is resilient to whatever should come next.