What the Pandemic Taught Us about Partnering on Research
With the urgent threat of housing instability in Chicago, we had to approach our research and collaborations differently.
By Emily Metz
The widespread economic precarity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare just how many households are a missed paycheck or two away from being unable to make rent or mortgage payments.
In Chicago, as in many large cities across the U.S., longstanding systemic inequities continue to perpetuate an acute housing affordability crisis. Our own estimates in the early stages of the pandemic suggested that just over 100,000 Chicago households — disproportionately Black and Latinx — were both rent-burdened and working in industries hard-hit by COVID.
Over 100,000 Chicago households — disproportionately Black and Latinx — were both rent-burdened and working in industries hard-hit by COVID.
Within days of the shelter-in-place order taking effect, our partners at Chicago’s Department of Housing (DOH) and Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) were laser-focused on keeping Chicagoans housed, despite the unprecedented number of people facing a possible threat of eviction. These agencies, as well as our nonprofit partners, sought to quickly leverage a combination of existing programs, philanthropic donations, and new sources of federal and state funding to expand access to rental assistance to meet an urgent need.
Advising on the design and evaluation of efforts to keep Chicagoans housed
Prior to the pandemic, the Inclusive Economy Lab already had efforts underway to help increase the evidence base on how to better target homeless prevention services, including via access to short-term cash and rental assistance here in Chicago. Given these existing partnerships, the Lab was able to apply our research and analytic capabilities to support both DOH and DFSS as they launched or expanded their respective programs.
As the City organized its pandemic response, the Lab leveraged ongoing check-ins with our partner agencies to understand how we could be helpful. Throughout the course of these conversations, our partners highlighted four ways the Inclusive Economy Lab could support their work:
- Advise on how elements of program design and implementation can allow agencies to better understand the effectiveness of these programs;
- Launch quarterly surveys of applicants to better understand how applicants’ housing status, finances, food security, and health was changing over time, and seek real-time feedback on the application process;
- Create a dashboard of leading indicators of housing insecurity in Chicago to help agencies plan and target their policy and programmatic response; and
- Advise on best practices from other cities and states.
Addressing a crisis sometimes necessitates doing research differently
Just as our partners were forced to adapt to the crisis at hand, the pandemic required us to think differently and adapt our research methods to meet the needs of the moment. In many instances, these adaptations helped us innovate our model in ways that we believe will have long-lasting, positive impacts on the work we do.
The pandemic required us to think differently and adapt our research methods to meet the needs of the moment.
For example, in launching an evaluation of their respective assistance programs, our partners independently chose to implement lotteries to determine which eligible applicants would receive access to a limited pool of funding. (Even as new sources of funding became available to the City, demand for services outpaced available assistance.) While we would typically recommend that our team conduct the lottery for a rigorous study of this kind, the pandemic did not allow time to accommodate such planning. Instead, we shared with our partner agencies best practices on conducting randomization for purposes of evaluation. We now have standardized materials that partners can use to ensure that program lotteries are implemented in a way that allows for rigorous evaluation.
In addition, our quarterly survey of applicants to rental assistance programs pushed us to continually refine our outreach strategies and improve participants’ likelihood and ability to respond. We have experimented with different methods of survey distribution (via email and text), various incentives for participation, and have recently begun to sample smaller groups of applicants on a biweekly basis to track responses to new policies in real time.
What’s next
As we finalize plans to evaluate the effects of these cash and rental assistance programs this summer, we are also preparing to launch the Chicago Housing Stability Dashboard. To aid our agency partners in responding to the end of federal and state eviction moratoria, our dashboard synthesizes data from an unprecedented number of sources — including administrative, publicly available, commercial, and qualitative data — to provide the most comprehensive view of leading indicators of housing instability in Chicago to date.
On Wednesday June 30th, Inclusive Economy Lab will host a panel discussion as part of the University of Chicago Harris School’s Summer of Social Impact Series. Our partners at DOH and The Resurrection Project will speak to lessons learned and hopes for the future of housing policy in Chicago. If you are interested in attending, you can register for the event here.
