News reports about a Los Angeles City Council member’s proposal to forgive the household debt of Angelenos hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic cited a report on the risk of widespread evictions compiled by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D). Councilman David Ryu pointed to the research in making a case for the debt relief proposal, which would be funded through the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility program, part of the federal CARES Act. “If we don’t deal with this crisis now, it will create an avalanche of homelessness and a generation of people buried in debt, and Los Angeles will pay the price for decades to come,” Ryu said. News outlets covering the proposal include the Larchmont Buzz, Los Feliz Ledger and Beverly Press. The II&D report was also recently cited by the Los Angeles Daily News and Pasadena Now.
A Los Angeles Times column on the threat of an “eviction cliff,” which could push hundreds of thousands of Californians out of their homes once legal protections expire, cited the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy’s extensive research on the impending crisis. Professor Emeritus Gary Blasi of UCLA Law, one of the authors of the research, likened the expected wave of evictions to a major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, “except the buildings will still be standing; it’s just the people that will be on the street.” In addition, the institute’s director, Professor Ananya Roy, shared highlights of the research along with short- and long-term policy goals at a webinar hosted by Occidental College. “What we need is a robust model of housing, not just emergency shelter,” Roy stressed. Other media outlets covering the institute’s research include Fox11 News, the Orange County Register, Pasadena Now and the Los Angeles Daily News.
A new study of the magnitude, pattern and causes of COVID-19’s impact on California housing reveals that Black people and Latinos are more than twice as likely as whites to be experiencing rent-related hardships.
The analysis by researchers from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and Ong & Associates, in coordination with the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, relies on the U.S. Census Bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey, a multiagency effort to collect information on the social and economic effects of COVID-19 on Americans. The research findings are based on pooling a 10-week sample of more than 22,000 adults in California for the period from April 23 to July 7.
During the pandemic, workers, families, businesses and communities have experienced enormous financial difficulties, and the new study estimates that more than 1.9 million adults in California were unable to pay their rent on time in early July. The finding that Black and Latino renters are particularly vulnerable echoes previous analyses showing that minority renters are more likely to be suffering economically during the pandemic.
“These systematic racial or ethnoracial disparities are the product of systemic inequality,” UCLA Luskin research professor Paul Ong writes in the study. “People of color, low-income individuals, and those with less education and skills are most at risk.”
An analysis of the survey responses shows that people of color are disproportionately more concentrated in the lower-income and lower-education brackets, and they entered the crisis with fewer financial and human capital resources. Those people of color who lost their jobs or suffered a significant earnings loss during the pandemic were therefore far more likely to fall behind on rent.
When the researchers looked closely at who was unable to pay rent during the period of study, they found that 23% were Black and 20% were Latino — more than double the 9% for both whites and Asians.
In her foreword to the study, UCLA urban planning professor Ananya Roy, the director of the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, writes, “An especially important finding of the report is that across socioeconomic status categories, Black and Latinx households are more likely to be unable to pay rent compared to non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans, a stark reminder of the entrenched racial disparities that are being rearticulated and amplified by the present crisis.”
The researchers delved deeper into the data to compare the experiences of various ethnic and racial groups based on demographic characteristics such as level of education. They found that Black and Latino respondents with some college education had higher rates of nonpayment of rent than whites and Asian Americans with similar educations. Racial disparities were evident even when the researchers focused on employment and earnings categories related to COVID-19.
“In other words,” Ong writes, “the pattern indicates that racial inequality is not due simply to class differences.”
Many experts believe this situation will lead to a wave of evictions in coming months unless governments take steps to protect people who have fallen behind on rent during the crisis. This includes extending the state’s eviction moratorium, continuing supplemental employment benefits and providing financial assistance to offset accumulated rent debt.
In a July 27 webinar hosted by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Paul Ong, Ananya Roy and others discuss the potential for mass COVID-19–related evictions in Los Angeles if current tenant protections are not extended.
The researchers did uncover some disparate patterns across ethnoracial groups. For example, the correlation between a lower income and the inability to pay rent was pronounced for both whites and Latinos, but it was minimal, and statistically insignificant, for Asians and Black people. The impact of less education was very pronounced for Black people but only minimally so for the other three groups. The effect of earnings losses was far greater for Black and Latino people than for white and Asian people.
Perhaps most surprising, the researchers said, was the effect of joblessness. While a loss of work led to an increased likelihood of nonpayment of rent among Asian and Latino people, it marginally decreased the odds of rental difficulties among white and Black people.
“One reasonable explanation is disparate access to unemployment insurance,” Ong writes in the study. He noted that Asians and Latinos may have less access to this type of financial relief — which can more than replace lost wages — because many work in informal ethnic job sectors and also face linguistic, cultural and legal barriers to applying for and collecting unemployment benefits.
The study urges elected officials to extend and expand unemployment insurance benefits. The researchers also call for the renewal of temporary tenant protections and say that financial relief should be provided to both renters and landlords.
Overall, the study’s findings show that prepandemic inequalities and pandemic labor-market hardships amplify systemic racial disparities. The economic impact on low-income and minority populations is likely to be long-lasting because so many people will have amassed a huge debt of deferred rents.
“Many will struggle to find meaningful employment in a protracted and uneven economic recovery,” Ong writes. “It is very likely that race will shape who will be most hurt.”
Ong is the director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He also founded Ong & Associates, an economic and policy analysis consulting firm that specializes in public interest issues and provided services pro bono for this study.
KPFK’s Background Briefing spoke with Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Director Ananya Roy about the looming threat of mass evictions in Los Angeles and across the country. The vast number of people facing loss of shelter deserve protection but are “up against very loud and powerful political interests that are propertied interests, and that is one reason for the failure at all levels of government to act on this matter,” Roy said. “This is not about a moment of eviction. It is about the long-term remaking of our cities and communities and an ongoing disaster that will last for years to come.” Commenting in the Guardian, Roy said the wave of displacement could make it impossible for officials to ignore tenants. “Mass evictions have always led to mass mobilizations. This moment will lead to an extraordinary housing justice uprising,” she predicted. The institute’s research on evictions has also been cited in Los Angeles magazine, Courthouse News Service and Invisible People.
KABC7 and FOX11 covered a forum featuring several UCLA Luskin scholars who weighed in on the impending threat of eviction and homelessness facing many Angelenos. Calling the tenants rights crisis “The Next Disaster Under COVID-19,” the forum brought together Paul Ong of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, Ananya Roy of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Gary Blasi of UCLA Law and moderator Karen Umemoto of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, along with several housing justice advocates. The news segment focused on the latest UCLA Luskin research identifying the region’s most vulnerable neighborhoods and outlining steps public officials can take to protect Angelenos at risk of losing their homes. Recommended policies include rent subsidies and the conversion of hotel and motel rooms, which have remained vacant during the pandemic, into housing. The research has also been shared by the Daily Journal, World Journal, LAist and NextCity, among other outlets.
A final report in a three-part series on housing justice and evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic has been released by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. The report draws upon guidance from unhoused people, legal advocates and community-based researchers to strongly advise governments to sanction existing self-organized communities of unhoused people and maintain sanitation stations on-site. The authors also recommend that authorities cease the seizing of property from the unhoused and stop conducting sweeps that result in people’s displacement from public space. The report is offered as guidance for policymakers and organizers seeking to support insecurely housed and unhoused people during and after the pandemic. It was written by doctoral student Hilary Malson of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at the UCLA School of Law. The authors also cautiously recommend that local governments establish temporary settlements in which tents and tiny structures would offer private, socially distanced forms of emergency shelter.
Ananya Roy, director of the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, co-authored an opinion piece for the Appeal that argued for the conversion of tens of thousands of vacant hotel rooms to house Angelenos threatened with homelessness. Given the downturn in the global tourist industry, many of these rooms are expected to remain unused for years to come, said Roy and co-author Jonny Coleman of NOlympics LA. The public acquisition of hotels and motels using tools such as eminent domain is the only way the region can add an adequate number of housing units quickly and affordably, they argued. “It is worth reflecting on how the present moment of compounding crises has broken past the limits of the possible,” they wrote. The piece pointed to the institute’s recently released report, “Hotel California: Housing the Crisis,” which was also cited in media outlets including LAist, Univision and NextCity.
UCLA research on the looming threat of eviction and homelessness in Los Angeles County is guiding debate about how to safeguard residents as the region attempts to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown. Recent studies from the Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D) and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK), both housed at UCLA Luskin, have been cited by policymakers, civic leaders and advocacy groups. An II&D report authored by Gary Blasi, UCLA professor emeritus of law, estimated that tens of thousands of households in the county could fall into homelessness due to the pandemic. Blasi called for robust tenant protections, as well as urgent planning for temporary housing for those who lose their homes. His findings have been cited on the news and editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, as well as on NPR, CalMatters, Streetsblog and Capital & Main. In response to the pandemic, the California court system in April put a hold on eviction proceedings statewide. Despite these protections, some Los Angeles landlords have sought to remove tenants by force or coercion, creating a “web of urban inequality,” according to Paul Ong, CNK director and author of a study on rent burdens that was cited by the Los Angeles Times. As the court considered lifting California’s eviction moratorium, advocacy groups such as Disability Rights California and the pro bono law firm Public Counsel lobbied against the move by presenting research from II&D and CNK, among other sources. The court subsequently delayed its review of the moratorium.
Author Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor emeritus of law, closely and thoroughly examines the precarious state of housing for workers in Los Angeles County who are unemployed and have no replacement income in the time of COVID-19.
The report starts with the 1,198,141 unemployment claims filed so far in Los Angeles County during the COVID-19 emergency, a level of unemployment not seen since the Great Depression.
Historical experience and previous studies have consistently shown that only about two-thirds of eligible workers apply for unemployment insurance, which in this case means 599,000 additional workers in Los Angeles County who are now unemployed. Blasi said that unemployed workers may not apply for many different reasons, among them the fact that 13% of the county workforce is undocumented and thus ineligible for unemployment benefits.
“Even before the pandemic, the number of those who were precariously housed was shocking,” Blasi said. “About 600,000 people in Los Angeles County lived in households where 90% of household income was being used to pay rent.”
Based on census data, Blasi estimates that about 75% of workers with no income are renters, or about 449,000 individuals in 365,000 renter households unable to pay rent and with no replacement income, nearly all of whom he says will be displaced.
Given the unprecedented nature of the crisis and the unknown capacity of familial and social networks to save those evicted from homelessness, Blasi offers two estimates. The most optimistic estimate is that 36,000 renter households, with 56,000 children based on U.S. Census figures for Los Angeles County, are likely to become homeless. If those support networks have been severely degraded by the pandemic, those numbers could rise to 120,000 newly homeless households, with 184,000 children.
Blasi notes that nearly all eviction cases, known as unlawful detainer proceedings, were stopped in early April by the California Judicial Council, the administrative arm of the state’s judiciary. That freeze expires either 90 days after the governor declares the COVID-19 emergency has ended, or when the order is amended or repealed by the Judicial Counci.
“The governor is highly unlikely to relinquish all his emergency powers while the public health crisis continues, but the Judicial Council will face enormous pressure from landlords to lift the hold on unlawful detainer cases,” Blasi said. “The floodgates will open.”
The report shows that the various restrictions on evictions placed by state and local officials since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic are unlikely to have much effect unless tenants have access to a lawyer, which is rarely the case in Los Angeles.
Professor Ananya Roy, the director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, described Blasi as one of the luminaries of public interest law, and emphasized the significance of this report.
“While the report shows the vast scale of the devastation to come in the form of evictions and homelessness in Los Angeles, none of this is inevitable,” she said. “The report makes it clear that the crisis at hand is as much political inertia as it is a public health emergency.”
The paper also includes several policy recommendations and options, beginning with interventions that allow more tenants to pay rent and reduce the number of evictions, some of which are currently being discussed in Sacramento.
Given that tenants who represent themselves almost always lose eviction cases in which landlords are represented by a lawyer, the report argues for a massive expansion of the number of attorneys to help tenants defend themselves. Potential partner organizations such as Neighborhood Legal Services, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and Inner City Law Center are mentioned.
For those who are evicted, the report argues for expanding current “rapid rehousing” programs and dramatically increasing the number of currently vacant hotel and motel rooms to provide temporary shelter. As a last resort, the report argues, government officials must prepare to rapidly expand second-best alternatives such as villages of small structures and authorized and supported encampments.
Subsequent reports by the Institute, including “Hotels as Housing” and “Preparing for the Camps,” will address these measures in greater detail.
Bill Parent, senior lecturer of public policy, has received a 2020 Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award, which recognizes UCLA faculty who consistently and enthusiastically support the scholarly and professional goals of the students they guide. Parent, one of 13 award winners selected from 126 nominees, was honored during this year’s Undergraduate Research Showcase, held May 18-22. During the showcase, three students mentored by Parent — Wadi Eghterafi, Matthew Moon and Parsia Vazirnia —presented two overlapping research projects that gauged public opinion about local strategies to combat homelessness. All three undergraduates had previously taken Parent’s class on urban homelessness policy. Under his direction, they went on to develop research projects that included conducting opinion surveys outside supermarkets in Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Westwood and Culver City and making longitudinal observations of the homeless population in Westwood Park. The student letter nominating Parent for the faculty award said he “has truly gone over and above to support my growth by means of constant meetings, feedback and all the work behind the scenes he does to help us grow to be the best researchers we can be.” This year’s virtual Undergraduate Research Showcase featured more than 900 students representing 90 majors presenting their individual and group projects remotely.
