COVID-19 Cracked the Foundation of Housing: We Need New Systems to Guarantee Homes for All
By Chris Willcox
Email the author: chris@aredcircle.org
For low-income families in St. Louis, housing instability and the threat of eviction is persistent, and the newly released Affordable Housing Report Card helps to illustrate why. The report finds that there were 18,000 evictions in St. Louis City and County in 2019 and 2020. Eviction is an inherently violent process that causes a family to lose the safety and security of a home under the threat of removal, by force if necessary. Holding this in mind, consider that 18,000 is 70 percent below normal for St. Louis, owing to eviction restrictions and moratoria put in place as policy to reduce the spread of COVID-19—policies that were allowed to lapse in the middle of last year. The pandemic upset an already fragile balance in our housing system. 25,345 families are estimated as being behind on rent with an average rent debt of $2,725. Many of these families are at-risk of losing homes they struggled to secure before COVID-19 arrived. It is my firm belief that housing is a human right—one that we have a collective responsibility to ensure. Taking that seriously requires us to think about how we mitigate the damage and, through policy, organizing, and mutual aid, to create a system that puts the value and dignity of human life at the center.
From the onset of the pandemic, in my experience with St. Louis Mutual Aid and A Red Circle, which serves North St. Louis County, paying their bills and staying in their homes is the most common need articulated to organizers, agencies, and nonprofits. COVID has accelerated existing economic inequities. Evictions and foreclosures are concentrated in majority-Black neighborhoods. Four out of the top 10 eviction filing hot spots are in North St. Louis County. This inequality is reflected in health outcomes, heightened by the pandemic. In St. Louis County, COVID cases per 100,000 people are 46 percent higher for African Americans compared to whites and 26 percent higher for deaths. In St. Louis City, that difference is 43 percent higher for cases and 90 percent higher for deaths. Public policy has failed Black and low-income families in every way, most of all in safeguarding life and ensuring safe housing.
The Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), passed as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), is supposed to address the short-term need to keep affected families safe in their homes, but it is a perfect representation of the dysfunction that pervades programs designed for low-income people. It is largely a bailout to landlords to maintain current occupancy, as it grants directly to them and utility companies, consistent with the pattern of the government not trusting people make the best use of benefits to improve their lives. It is also so cumbersome that the money has been effectively impossible to spend. Missouri has spent only 48.1 percent of the first round of funds available, according the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s ERA tracking project. Few states have even come close to spending down both rounds of funding, which means we have yet to find out what the crisis looks like when the money finally runs out.
St. Louis Council meeting, December 21, 2021
St. Louis County stands out locally in having spent all of its first-round money, but it reached a crisis when it did so. In the regular meeting of the St. Louis Council on December 21, 2021, human services director Howard Hayes, who had just been appointed on September 17, shared that their current contractor, Nan McKay, would not renew their contract, and so it would take an estimated 60-90 days after hiring a new one to make the new system operational and start spending the second round of funding that would otherwise be already available (see 01:00:00 through 01:45:00 in the Council Meeting video linked above). The County Council passed $5 million in supplemental funding from ARPA so that it could pay outstanding awards during that time, since ERAP Round 1 funds had been fully committed.
If the government has such a hard time administering the program, imagine the disproportionate burden on the most vulnerable residents. Many of the people I’ve worked with have been seniors who do not have email addresses. This is a problem for an application that is entirely online and can require a more sophisticated understanding of computing such as why the online portal won’t take .PNG photos of your documents from your phone without being converted to a PDF or a .JPEG first. An applicant needs to submit 5-8 documents, including items like your 2020 tax return. The time spent on helping a single family apply can take up to an hour, and that is if they come prepared in advance, having gathered all the necessary documents. You may be lucky the file uploads at all, as I have encountered unknown errors that prevent the upload from going through, leaving the applicant to send it in an email to the contractor directly, or find some other way to get it to them to prevent the application from being rejected.
Aside from the immobilizing bureaucratic process, the design of the program itself fails to take the realities of life into account. First, it prompts you to provide documentation of direct financial impact on you from COVID-19. We should all understand that every person is connected to a multitude of systems, and this is especially true for low-income families. The program assumes hyper-individualized nuclear family units that can pinpoint exactly the cause of their economic misfortune and connect it to the economic shock of COVID, which had innumerable downstream effects. Low-income people by necessity already rely on extended family and friends for support in emergencies. One person losing their job or dying from COVID has second and third order effects on everyone else in their social network, some of which cannot be quantified. These effects are even more important for families that have limited resources and have already been disadvantaged by racist housing and economic policies that continue to manifest in the highly segregated landscape of St. Louis.
The core of the dysfunction of rental assistance is that it exists to prop up a housing system that fails to provide affordable housing from the beginning. Home prices rose 18.6 percent nationwide in a single year during the pandemic, well above the overall rate of inflation. In St. Louis, the Report Card documents an 11 percent increase in rents and a deficit of 34,000 homes affordable for people who make $22,400 or less. A family needs to make $18.04 per hour full time to afford fair market rent.
What rent assistance does is pay landlords the back rent that was already unaffordable for many in order to prevent an eviction, hoping that the family continues to make do with limited community resources. We tend to see poverty as a personal failing, yet we don’t account for what an eviction is, which is a means by which a property owner retains the right to call in an implicit threat of violence from the government as the sheriff is called to remove a family from their home, all so that the property can generate income for its owner again. Outside the large-scale financial bailouts in the recent past, we generally do not treat other assets this way. It is assumed that investments involve risk. Landlords know this and use myriad screening tools to filter out non-preferred tenants. Yet the state guarantees the ability of non-owner-occupied homes to be put on the market the second it stops generating value. This is not a system that centers human life and dignity, and it highlights the reality that housing cannot be both affordable and a financial asset. Increasingly, the owners of homes are investors, and speculative investment in housing has driven both surges in home prices and deepened the crashes that followed. This may be one reason some landlords are refusing ERAP money entirely, preferring to evict over getting paid the accrued debt. We also see that when communities see economic growth, gentrification sets in, displacing people who lived in these communities before.
If we are going to build a housing system that guarantees a place to live for everyone, we need to start considering alternatives to the standard for-profit model. This can be public housing, community land trusts, cooperative housing, or other models of ownership that can produce the homes people need and ensure that people can afford to live in them. It so happens that ARPA has provided local governments unprecedented sums with which to invest in communities. A housing system that prioritizes the flourishing of marginalized residents could use that kind of investment.
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Chris Willcox is the Mutual Aid and Policy Associate at A Red Circle where he manages food distribution, connects North County residents with community resources, and serves as an advocate for policy that advances racial equity and social justice. He has a Master of Social Work from University of Missouri-St. Louis and is passionate about housing, healthcare, and freedom from police violence for all. Outside of A Red Circle, Chris is a member of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Coalition and has been an organizer with St. Louis Mutual Aid since 2020, which is focused on building collective power and creating communities of care.
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The views expressed in this blog post belong to the author and do not represent the views of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Coalition, the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis, URBNRX, or Osiyo Design + Engagement. If you'd like to contribute to the St. Louis affordable housing conversation by submitting a piece for publication in this blog, please contact us.