Emergency Housing Assistance and Financial Stability: Evidence from the Los Angeles COVID-19 Rent Relief Lottery

This project will study the impact of temporary emergency housing assistance payments provided by the city of Los Angeles (CA) to low-income households affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Using funds made available through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the city of Los Angeles provided up to $2,000 in emergency rental assistance to program recipients. These funds were allocated by lottery to qualified applicants and paid either directly to the tenant or to their landlord. We will use lottery assignment as a source of random variation in payment of funds to study how such assistance causally impacts housing and financial stability among program recipients. To do so, we will link application-level administrative data for approximately 37,000 lottery participants to consumer credit records we plan to purchase from Experian and Clarity Solutions. These data will allow us to measure how receiving rental payment assistance affects a range of economic outcomes including residential mobility, use of non-traditional high-cost credit, overall indebtedness, credit scores, and default. In addition to this, we will also collect baseline and follow-up survey data for roughly 8,000 program applicants containing detailed demographic information as well as survey-based measures of the same outcomes. The results from this study will provide timely empirical evidence that can potentially inform the design and administration of the newly approved $21 billion in additional emergency rental assistance authorized by Congress through the American Rescue Plan Act in early March 2021.