New Article: Noah M. Kazis, Can Affordable Housing Be a Safety Lessons from a Pandemic , 132 Yale L. J. 412 (2022). Abstract below:
The COVID-19 pandemic posed an unprecedented challenge to housing stability, with mass unemployment and societal disruption leaving millions of tenants struggling to make rent. Aggressive public intervention avoided the worst outcomes, but the effort to protect renters exposed the mismatch of existing affordable-housing programs to moments of short-term crisis, whether personal or nationwide. These programs are not designed to serve as safety nets or to act nimbly during market upheavals; they are primarily targeted to serve people facing chronically low incomes over the long term. Nor can the new emergency programs created midpandemic straightforwardly be made permanent. But while affordable-housing programs are not currently a safety net—and indeed, cannot easily serve this function—the pandemic also offers valuable insights into what building that housing safety net would take.
Poverty Law 