According to a 2024 Harvard University report on the status of housing in the United States, things are starting to look up, especially for renters. Rents are stabilizing while inventory is growing and outpacing demand in some places, which means that renters have more housing options than they did just a few months ago. Despite this, rents remain above pre-pandemic levels and unaffordability has hit an all-time high. Homelessness and evictions have also risen, as have home foreclosure rates.
Many Americans are still recovering from the economic impact of the pandemic and struggling to find and keep affordable housing.
Amid high eviction rates, some recipients struggled with unfavorable rental histories that made future housing applications unlikely to be approved. When participants were able to find housing, they often faced economic and personal challenges that made it difficult to keep living in their homes. Qualitative narratives from cash transfer recipients highlight the barriers individuals faced while applying for housing, as well as the ways in which some recipients used the cash transfer payments to overcome them.
Barriers to accessing housing
With rising housing costs and a decrease in available low-income rentals, participants struggled to find affordable housing. A significant portion of recipients among the qualitative participants reported wanting to move but not being able to afford it.
Xia, a mother of four, liked her neighborhood. It felt safe and her neighbors were friendly, but her 2-bedroom apartment was too small. It was also bug-infested. She wanted to move, “hopefully, to a bigger place so [the kids] are able to play more cuz right now, it's just too little for them to really play in.”
At the time, Xia’s husband was incarcerated and she was the sole income earner. She worked as a medical coding specialist and was paid hourly, but as a solo parent with limited childcare, she could only work when her children were at school. This meant resources were often scarce and affording a move seemed out of reach.
“We will see about [moving]. I don't know yet, but not anytime too soon. Cuz here, everything is getting more expensive. I probably have to save up a little bit before I’m able to make the change,” Xia said.
Even when participants like Xia found affordable housing, they were often unable to meet application requirements such as having a rental history with no prior evictions or outstanding debts. Many landlords also required tenants to make at least three times the rent per month in income, which is often unrealistic for people working minimum wage jobs.
This was a barrier for Kiara when she was looking for a place to rent. Kiara wanted a bigger place in a safer neighborhood. She had been saving to move, and despite having enough to cover the costs of the move, including the first and last month’s rent, her income as a behavioral therapist was not enough to meet the rental income requirement.
So Kiara listed her unconditional cash payments as an additional source of income. “I use the thousand dollars [to say] that I make a little bit more a year,” Kiara explained.
Then there is the issue of credit scores.
When Amber’s rent increased, she began looking for another less expensive living situation, but she struggled to find affordable housing due to her low credit score. In order to move, she had to improve her credit, so Amber used the unconditional cash payments to pay off $2,500 in student loan debt. She then applied for a credit card and used the cash payment to pre-pay $500, paying it back in full by the end of the month for 3 consecutive months. With this strategy, Amber increased her score to 625, more than 100 points higher than her credit score at the start of the program.
Ultimately, Amber decided to stay in her apartment a little longer while she continued to work on improving her credit and saving up enough money to buy her own home.
Barriers to keeping housing
Once participants found housing, the biggest barrier to keeping it was affording the monthly rent or mortgage payments. One of the things we heard most from participants who experienced unemployment, even temporarily, was that they struggled to pay their rent and were forced to move as a result.
Darius, a father of three, was laid off from work due to COVID-19. When the time came to renew his apartment lease, his application was denied. He began looking for another place to live but he struggled to find something for which he could qualify.
“Since the pandemic, it is even harder to find an apartment now,” he said in an early interview. “I called an apartment before that had a for rental sign and asked him what the requirements were.” Darius says the requirements included having a 700 credit score. “I ain't got no 700 credit score,” Darius continued. “And then some apartments and landlords ask for like not two times the rent, they ask for three times the rent.”
Darius used the cash transfers to stay at a hotel for a few months before moving in with his mother. The last time we spoke to him, he had qualified for subsidized housing and was living alone in a one-bedroom apartment.
Unfortunately, transitioning from one housing situation to another was not always possible and some recipients experienced bouts of homelessness. This was often preceded by an eviction and impacted participants with low incomes and families with children the most.
For example, Latoya, a single mother of three, withheld her rent when her landlord refused to address a bug infestation in her unit. After a court trial, she was ordered to leave her apartment and started applying for housing. She had a hard time getting her rental applications accepted due to bad credit and the fact that she didn't make the minimum income required.
“Me and my kids were homeless for about four months,” Latoya said. “Then we moved into this apartment that we're in now. Though it seems better - it doesn't have the bugs and everything that I was trying to get away from — the rent is so high that it makes it hard.”
Overcoming barriers
To alleviate the stress related to housing, many recipients we spoke to put all of their unconditional cash payments toward their rent or mortgage, ensuring that they had a place to live. We see evidence of this in our quantitative data. Recipients spent significantly more on rent—an average of $52 more each month than control participants. We also find the cash had a significant effect on paying for housing. Recipients were 4.2 percentage points more likely to pay for housing compared to control participants.
One recipient, Brianna, was able to take over her father's mortgage payments. At the start of the program, Brianna was living with her father in her childhood home alongside her stepmother and two nephews. She was employed as a personal care assistant at the time and had a consistent and stable income. During the third year of the cash transfer program, however, her father and family moved out of state. Thanks in part to the cash transfers, Brianna was able to take over the mortgage payments. Eventually, she got married and continues to live in her childhood home with her husband, their 2 cats, and 1 dog.
For many recipients who were not making ends meet prior to the transfers, the cash helped them meet their basic needs. Consider for example, Susan, a single mother of three.
At the start of the program, Susan lived in a suburban community where she owned her home. She had a Bachelor's degree but was unable to find stable work due to her criminal background. Her photography business, which was her main source of income, was impacted by COVID-19 which meant she had unreliable paydays. She had no savings and a mortgage she was struggling to pay. She acknowledged that the cash payments were critical to her ability to keep her home and that without it, she does not “know how the situation with my mortgage and my house would've turned out.”
For both Brianna and Susan as well as many others we spoke to, the cash payments made keeping their homes a possibility. Notably, during the three program years, home-owning qualitative participants did not experience any foreclosures, despite rising foreclosure rates nationwide.
We are continuing to explore the impact of the cash on homeownership, material hardship, and housing instability. We will share additional findings in the upcoming months.
Disclaimer: These stories and participant experiences are not meant to be representative of all qualitative participants. Instead, they are in-depth snapshots of the lived reality of cash transfer recipients across different areas of their lives and at distinct periods during the program.
Methodological Statement: The data for this piece comes from five rounds of in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with 156 participants. Interview summaries, field notes, thematic memos and extensive case memos reflecting data from all five rounds were coded using an iterative and open coding method. The initial findings reflected in these pieces were identified during this first round of open coding.