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Abstract
Eviction prevention policies are often crafted to focus on either an upstream approach, prior to households interacting with eviction court, or a downstream approach, once the court process has begun and when households are in an acute housing crisis. This paper examines one such upstream approach, the Virginia Eviction Reduction Pilot (VERP) program, implemented in a first phase from 2021 to 2022 in the context of statewide Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) and state and federal tenant protections. The paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to measure the effect of VERP on filings and judgments in areas served by the program and in-depth interviews with program staff to elucidate how VERP functioned as an upstream eviction prevention program during a volatile policy landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic. While we find no statistically significant effect of VERP on filings and judgments, we triangulate interview data to detail how VERP functioned in a rapidly changing policy environment to stabilize households by leveraging ERA funds. We find that the end of COVID eviction policies like ERA placed increasing pressure on VERP to fill a void it was not designed to address, and so effectively implementing upstream policies requires consistent and robust downstream assistance.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Benjamin F. Teresa
Benjamin F. Teresa is an associate professor of urban and regional studies and planning at Virginia Commonwealth University. He studies the changing relationship between finance and cities. His research examines how the increasing role of financial institutions, actors, and logic affects urban development and governance. Rooted in a community-engaged approach that emphasizes democratic inquiry and distributed expertise, his research focuses on how communities and planners exercise control over the institutions that shape how cities change. Teresa’s research engages across multiple arenas including real estate development, housing, tax incentives, and urban education. He is the co-founder and director of the RVA Eviction Lab, a community-responsive research venue for addressing housing instability.
Kathryn L. Howell
Kathryn L. Howell is the Director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and an Associate Professor, Urban Studies & Planning Program in the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr Howell’s research unpacks concepts of physical and cultural displacement and power in changing communities and investigates ways that policy and planning can be used to address these issues. Specifically, she interrogates the polices, governance structures and roles of tenants and advocacy in the preservation of affordable housing. Further, she investigates ways that redevelopment, implementation and maintenance of cultural landscapes can facilitate or abridge the right to the city for communities of color. Her book, Affordable Housing Preservation in Washington, DC: A Framework for Local Funding, Collaborative Governance and Community Organizing for Change focuses on the ways tenants can be centered in policies and practices that keep housing affordable as cities change. Before coming to UMD, she co-founded and co-directed the RVA Eviction Lab, a community-responsive data initiative at VCU, where she engaged with community partners to support housing justice efforts of organizers, service providers and policy advocates. Before pursuing a PhD, Dr Howell worked for Maryland and Washington, DC housing and community development agencies focusing on affordable housing preservation, state program monitoring and inclusionary zoning.
I.-Shian Suen
I.-Shian Suen is an associate professor of urban and regional studies and planning in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr Suen’s research and teaching interests include land use planning, planning support systems, and the applications of geospatial technologies for data analysis and visualization. Dr Suen has an MUP degree from the University of Oregon (1988) and a PhD in Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington (1998). Since joining VCU in 2004, he has developed a graduate certificate program in Geographic Information Systems and taught numerous courses related to geospatial technologies and their applications. He utilizes geospatial technologies to conduct many of his research projects and professional studies. He also provides technical assistance to communities and helps them assess their current conditions, envision their community’s future, and devise a plan of action to attain that future.
Amanda Robinson
Amanda Robinson is a Senior Biostatistician at the C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Roy Sabo
Roy Sabo is an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and is serving as Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Population Health. He is also the Director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) Core in the C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Science. Dr Sabo is a long-time collaborator with primary care researchers in the VCU Department of Family Medicine, focusing on cluster-randomized trials. He is also an expert in the design and analysis of population-level studies combining claims data with information from external sources. His methodological research focuses on Bayesian adaptive clinical trials, particularly with respect to using Decreasingly Informative Priors to avoid small-sample irregularities.