Nearly one in three renters experienced housing insecurity, on average, each week from late April through July, according to a forthcoming report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
Among homeowners, about one in six were housing insecure during the same period.
The CARES Act, which was signed into law in March, provided a number of measures to help people replace lost income and stay in their homes. “Yet, housing insecurity—as measured by missing or deferring rent or mortgage payments, or having little confidence in one’s ability to make rent or mortgage payments—was very high during the initial months of the pandemic,” says the CEPR.
A preview of the organization’s findings reveals:
· Hispanic and Black renters have seen particularly large increases in housing insecurity, with roughly 45% of renters in both groups reporting housing insecurity during the pandemic, an increase of about 13 percentage points for Hispanic renters and 8 percentage points for Black renters since 2019.
· Among households with children, racial and ethnic gaps in housing insecurity—between white and Black households and white and Hispanic households—narrowed between 2017 and 2019. But this progress has been lost. Roughly 44% to 45% of Hispanic and Black households with children were housing insecure each week between April and July, and the racial and ethnic gaps in housing insecurity were wider than at any point in 2017 to 2019.
CEPR’s analysis also finds that “Black women had the highest probability of housing insecurity, while white men had the lowest. Black men were just behind Black women in terms of risk. Next were Asian women and then, all with roughly similar risks, were Hispanic women, Hispanic men, and Asian men.”
Several of the CARES Act provisions expired in late July, including a $600 per week increase in unemployment insurance and a federal moratorium on evictions in federally assisted housing.
“Absent a massive increase in direct financial assistance to struggling renters and homeowners, these findings suggest that millions of strapped renters and homeowners will go deeper into debt, face more hardship and insecurity, and ultimately lose or be evicted from their homes,” says the CEPR.