July 01, 2021

Over the past week, the Biden administration took aggressive steps to address the housing crisis. It named Sandra L. Thompson as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Centers for Disease Control extended the eviction moratorium by one month, and yesterday, the White House hosted a summit to make immediate eviction prevention plans. “With housing getting this much attention, I think the hope is this could be a moment for policymakers to say, ‘Hey, we should really enact some long-term solutions.’ It’s really hard to implement emergency fixes in an emergency,” said Alicia Mazzara, an expert on the housing policy team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

An elderly Louisiana couple living on a fixed income turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for aid after Hurricane Laura damaged their home, but they didn’t get the help they needed. Internal FEMA documents show that their story mirrors those of other disaster survivors with low incomes: the agency’s analysis found they are less likely to receive federal aid than more affluent people. FEMA wants to rectify the systemic bias and will “continue to evaluate the program holistically and ensure that we are delivering assistance equitably," said Keith Turi, the agency’s assistant administrator for recovery.

New research from the University of California, Berkeley, found 81 percent of US metropolitan areas are more segregated now than they were in 1990. And despite becoming more racially diverse in recent decades, Los Angeles is the sixth-most segregated city of the 221 metropolitan areas studied. The study also found that outcomes such as income, home values, and life expectancy are worse in segregated areas than integrated areas. “It’s a vicious cycle in terms of what was done to our society during that time period because it allowed for a major level of disinvestment of communities of color and lower-income white communities,” says historian Alison Rose Jefferson.

Colorado is the fourth most expensive state in the country, and 50.9 percent of its renters are cost burdened. Meanwhile, 15 percent of Coloradans are behind on rent and face the possibility of eviction when the federal moratorium ends. The state received $247 million in federal rental and utility assistance for struggling renters, and a bill that limits late fees and prohibits landlords from evicting tenants solely from their failure to pay late fees awaits the governor’s signature.