The economic impact of COVID‐19 threatened mass housing insecurity undermining the health and financial recovery from the pandemic. Unprecedented federal policy responses halted court‐ordered evictions and injected billions of dollars in rental assistance, but questions remain whether housing interventions adequately accounted for dynamics that drive landlord‐tenant interactions, including accumulations of rental and mortgage arrears, rental unit availability, and low‐income housing options. A system dynamics model probes complex feedback dynamics driving tenant and landlord decision‐making in the low‐income rental housing market pre‐ and postpandemic protections. Feedback loops highlight trade‐offs considered by low‐income tenants and landlords in the context of scarcity and uncertainty. Simulations suggest the eviction moratorium and federal emergency rental assistance prevented a tidal wave of evictions, but rental arrears, overcrowding, and homelessness remain elevated. Failure to address underlying financial hardship and limited affordable housing undermines COVID recovery. © 2023 The Authors.
Bed bugs have reemerged in the United States and worldwide over recent decades, presenting a major challenge to both public health practitioners and housing authorities. A number of municipalities have proposed or initiated policies to stem the bed bug epidemic, but little guidance is available to evaluate them. One contentious policy is disclosure, whereby landlords are obligated to notify potential tenants of current or prior bed bug infestations. Aimed to protect tenants from leasing an infested rental unit, disclosure also creates a kind of quarantine, partially and temporarily removing infested units from the market. Here, we develop a mathematical model for the spread of bed bugs in a generalized rental market, calibrate it to parameters of bed bug dispersion and housing turnover, and use it to evaluate the costs and benefits of disclosure policies to landlords. We find disclosure to be an effective control policy to curb infestation prevalence. Over the short term (within 5 years), disclosure policies result in modest increases in cost to landlords, while over the long term, reductions of infestation prevalence lead, on average, to savings. These results are insensitive to different assumptions regarding the prevalence of infestation, rate of introduction of bed bugs from other municipalities, and the strength of the quarantine effect created by disclosure. Beyond its application to bed bugs, our model offers a framework to evaluate policies to curtail the spread of household pests and is appropriate for systems in which spillover effects result in highly nonlinear cost–benefit relationships.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10087349
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 116
- Issue:
- 13
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 6473-6481
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract System Dynamics Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of System Dynamics Society. -
Using a unique data set of millions of advertisements for rental housing and data on the geographic distribution of housing voucher holders, we examine the limits of housing market policies that rely on private-market landlords to meet public needs. We find that although advertised affordable housing is more prevalent in some zip codes than others, voucher households are more geographically clustered than affordable housing. Moreover, voucher holders are overly concentrated in “lower opportunity” zip codes, those with fewer resources for children’s well-being, despite the advertisement of affordable housing in higher opportunity neighborhoods. Using text-analysis techniques, we identify advertisements that explicitly accept or reject voucher holders and find that ads seeking voucher-holding tenants are overrepresented in lower opportunity neighborhoods. We evaluate the significance of these findings for theories of predatory inclusion.more » « less
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Abstract Bed bugs have re‐established themselves as a common household pest in the United States and pose significant public health and economic concerns, particularly in urban areas.
Documenting the scale of the bed bug resurgence and identifying the underlying predictors of the spatial patterns of their incidence is challenging, largely because available data come from biased self‐reporting through local government code enforcement.
Here, we make use of a novel source of systematically collected data from periodic inspections of multifamily housing units in Chicago to investigate neighbourhood drivers of bed bug infestation prevalence in Chicago.
Bed bug infestations are strongly associated with income, eviction rates and crowding at the neighbourhood level.
That bed bug prevalence is higher in lower‐income neighbourhoods with higher levels of household crowding and eviction notices provides unique empirical evidence of the disproportionate allocation of public health burdens upon neighbourhoods facing multiple dimensions of disadvantage.
A free
Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. -
null (Ed.)This study draws on 71 indepth, semistructured interviews with landlords and property managers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We find that the perceived burdens associated with evictions often make evictions less desirable for small-scale landlords than finding ways to work with tenants to keep them in their homes, including developing payment plans to help tenants catch up on back rent, adjusting rental rates, accepting services in lieu of rent, and aiding in referrals to housing and social service programs. Some landlords employ a technique of paying tenants to vacate, a practice referred to as cash for keys, which is an informal, off-the-books eviction. Our findings suggest that off-the-books evictions are far more prevalent than has been measured in official eviction data; therefore, the prevalence of residential displacement is more severe than previously documented.more » « less
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