An All-American Crisis: Addressing Racial Disparities in U.S. Housing Instability through the Lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand the origins, manifestations, effects, and implications of existing racial disparities in housing inequality in the United States, as motivated by the exacerbating impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It does this by analyzing racial disparities within the specific case study of rental instability in Philadelphia, particularly in the context of the pandemic. This thesis closely examines the various metrics and dimensions of rental instability in Philadelphia, investigates their historical origins and legal constructions, and develops a systemic framework for understanding racial disparities in rental instability as part of a broader, interdependent network of systems of racism that interact to produce adverse life outcomes for non-white populations in the U.S.

This thesis then proceeds to overview policy solutions that have been implemented by the U.S. government at the federal, state, and municipal levels to address rental instability in the time of COVID-19, before analyzing their efficacy. It finds that, on the whole, the government has been more concerned with mitigating the public health hazards of rental instability than with exploring systemic solutions to systemic problems of affordability, accessibility, and racial discrimination within the U.S. rental landscape. Even the actions that the government has taken to reduce the effect of rental instability on COVID-19 transmission and mortality often fail to account for important aspects of the experiences of low-income, non-white renters and their households.

Finally, this thesis proposes its own set of policy solutions that both respond more effectively and holistically to the exigencies faced by renter households during the pandemic and create systemic rental reforms that can be sustained and improved upon well into the future, focusing all the while on ameliorating the disproportionate burden of rental instability faced by non-white demographics and dismantling the structural origins of those racial disparities. It proposes (1) federally extending and enforcing a nationwide eviction moratorium for the duration of the pandemic, (2) federally providing rental and utility assistance to renter households in the form of direct, recurring cash transfers for the duration of the pandemic, (3) federally expanding the housing voucher program and raising the federal minimum wage, (4) federally dismantling racial residential segregation by combating lending and income discrimination while curbing exclusionary zoning laws at the state and municipal level, and (5) federally incentivizing investment in disinvested urban areas while expanding home ownership opportunities, enacting property tax relief for low-income home owners, and investing in home repair at the municipal level to prevent gentrification and price-based displacement pressure.