Rental assistance, housing insecurity, & well-being: Spillover effects of emergency rental assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to exacerbate housing insecurity among renters in the United States, with spillover effects on mental health and non-housing material hardships such as food insecurity. As one response to the potential crisis, the federal government implemented the $47 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERA) to stabilize rental housing through aid to vulnerable renter households. This study evaluates impacts of ERA on two non-housing outcomes, food insufficiency and psychological distress, using data from the Household Pulse Survey fielded by the U.S. Census Bureau. We created treatment and comparison groups from households that applied for rental assistance and either received aid (treatment) or were awaiting a decision (comparison), using coarsened exact matching to further improve validity. We first estimated bivariate probit models to examine the relationship between rental assistance and non-housing outcomes, then conducted mediation analyses to gauge the extent to which effects were associated with improved housing security. Rental assistance reduced probability of food insufficiency (average treatment effect -0.09), anxiety symptoms (-0.10) and depression symptoms (-0.08). Approximately half of these effects were mediated through improvements in housing security as measured by being in arrears, and larger fractions when housing security was represented using an index of depth of arrears and perceived risk of housing loss. Findings highlight public health benefits of pandemic rental assistance and the potential for housing policy to improve material and psychological wellbeing.