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Breaking down behavioral barriers to affordable housing in the US

Comment & Opinion 17th Dec 2024

The US is experiencing an affordable housing crisis, and renters are bearing the brunt of it.

For nearly half of renters – over 21 million households – more than 30% of their income goes toward rent. This leaves little room to make ends meet, let alone to save for emergencies – creating a greater risk of homelessness.

Policymakers, philanthropies and community organizations are collaborating with the private sector to address the many factors fueling this crisis. They are working to increase the rental housing supply, to get more people into those homes and avoid eviction through social assistance programs.

But these solutions don’t always achieve their full intended impact. One of the reasons why is because they are missing a valuable lens: applied behavioral science.

Insights from behavioral science help identify key actors involved and what they do (or don’t do) to contribute to the housing crisis and design interventions to shift their behavior. Evaluation shows if these interventions work, for who and why. Using this lens can help create more effective solutions, as we’ve seen when tackling similarly complex issues, like corruption and the climate crisis.

So, whose behavior should we think about in order to get more renters in stable, safe housing?

Landlord behavior 

Landlords need to balance profits with offering affordable rates and renting their units out fairly. Many US states have enacted laws to support these behaviors. But sometimes landlords don’t comply, and affordable units fail to reach those who need them most.

For example, in Newark, New Jersey, landlords must register with the Office of Rent Control, which is then able to monitor and enforce rent control laws. This increases the supply of affordable rental units, even without new construction. But in 2021, only half of the more than 50,000 units eligible for rent control were estimated to be registered.

We partnered with the City of Newark to design and evaluate a behaviorally-informed mailer to nudge landlords to register their rental properties. It resulted in nearly 2,000 new rental units on the market for low-income families that wouldn’t have been available otherwise.

We’re currently working on a project with the New York Attorney General’s Office examining how landlords and real estate brokers choose tenants among rental applicants. In New York, it’s illegal to discriminate against prospective tenants based on their source of income. Our research has revealed early insights into the behavioral barriers to compliance at play:

  • Landlords we interviewed were concerned about the extra paperwork involved with tenants that relied on housing vouchers
  • Landlords were also concerned that payments from tenants with housing vouchers might stop unexpectedly 
  • Some landlords thought they wouldn’t get caught discriminating and that penalties would be negligible 
  • Some brokers assumed that landlords wanted to avoid tenants who were eligible for subsidized housing

Our team has designed behavioral intervention ideas to address these barriers and are implementing and evaluating them now. 

Tenant behavior

While trying to figure out assistance programs and searching for housing, tenants face many structural obstacles that can negatively influence their behavior. In our work with a New Zealand government housing program, we conducted qualitative research to better understand these challenges.

We found that for clients who were able to successfully navigate the complex language and jargon of the application process, it could take months or even years for them to find a home through the program. They received few progress updates during this waiting period. 

In the meantime, clients lived in low-quality housing. Many moved often – fueled by optimism bias – hopeful that they would find better housing for a similar rate. This added stress and financial strain with no improvements to health or wellbeing. Others called their caseworkers weekly or daily for updates, causing undue pressure and higher workloads for program staff.

Behavioral science can help to address these obstacles. Rewriting public-facing communications in plain language can make information easier to understand and act on, as we found in our work with the state of Nevada. It can also make the client experience less stressful. 

Breaking big goals into smaller tasks with clear next steps and offering progress updates via texts or emails can sustain motivation over time as well. Finally, timing support to coincide with moments of housing precarity, like following a divorce or losing a job, can help busy caseworkers prioritize how to spend their time most productively.

Homeowner behavior

Residents who ascribe to the NIMBY (not in my back yard) mindset can stand in the way of governments and developers trying to build more high-density affordable housing units. BIT partnered with a state government housing authority in Australia to test a behavioral solution to getting communities on board with development.

We designed and evaluated letters from the housing authority to help increase resident support for a hypothetical social housing redevelopment and decrease the likelihood of residents contacting the authority to complain. We interviewed neighbors of redevelopments and used our insights to incorporate different features in the letters, including increased operational transparency, decreased uncertainty and opportunities to provide feedback. This approach boosted support for the redevelopment compared to the status quo.

Similar low-cost behavioral communications could help shift the NIMBY mentality and promote widespread support for affordable housing development in US cities.

Solving the housing crisis is a collaborative effort

Housing is a human right. These ideas are just scratching the surface of how applied behavioral science can help get more renters into safe, stable and affordable homes.

We look forward to partnering with more US city and state governments, community organizations and the private sector to develop and test innovative solutions to the affordable housing crisis and create a more equitable housing landscape.

If you’re interested in exploring how we can help you design more effective services or programs and better use data and evaluation to shape initiatives, get in touch.

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