Mar 30, 2021
Lessons from Newark, NJ: Utilizing reminder letters to increase affordable housing
Learn how the City of Newark boosted the number of registered units by nearly 2,000 — and how to do the same in your city
Case Study: Provide More Affordable Housing by Increasing Landlord Unit Registration
Project Summary
City: Newark, NJ (Note: this project was designed and implemented with direct support from the Behavioral Insights Team as part of the city’s participation in the WWC Economic Mobility Initiative)
Goal: Increase number of affordable units registered by landlords
Department Lead: Newark’s Economic & Housing Development
Timeline: 3–6 Months
Intervention: Letter
Evaluation Method: Randomized Control Trial
Result: Landlords receiving the letter were 20 times more likely to register their units, compared to a control group.
Want to try this yourself?
Read an overview of the project below and then download the evaluation replication worksheet here.
NOTE: This worksheet includes detailed steps that you can follow to implement this project in your city and design a rigorous evaluation. This resource is best suited for city staff working in housing, offices of innovation/performance, and staff who are interested in running evaluations more generally.
Cities lack affordable housing — resulting in large inequities. Landlord unit registration is an important step in helping cities tackle this complex issue.
The U.S. faces an unprecedented affordable housing crisis: nearly 75 percent of all low-income families are severely rent-burdened, paying more than half their income on rent. In cities, this problem is generally even more acute given the higher proportion of renters and lower-income residents that live in these population hubs.
While not a universal remedy to this systemic problem, many cities have control of an important lever that can help expand the number of affordable units in their city: landlord unit registration. Cities often require landlords to register units and rental rates annually, which allows them to collect better data and hold landlords accountable for affordable rents and adherence to tenant protections required by law. By holding landlords accountable to rent-controlled regulations, more affordable units are made available on the market — rather than at higher rents — which means residents have better access to more affordable housing.
In Newark, NJ, landlord unit registration was a significant problem for the city. In a city where 75 percent of residents are renters, Newark’s Office of Rent Control estimates that only 50 percent of rental units are registered with the City. Registration is vital for communicating with landlords, enforcing housing policies, and promoting new programs to help them and their residents. While exact policies and processes vary from city to city, having an up-to-date repository of rental units is a key piece of the affordable housing puzzle.
Using learnings from behavioral science, make it easier for landlords to register units, and remind them of the requirements.
First, Newark — with the support of the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) as part of the WWC Economic Mobility Initiative — dove into their landlord unit registration process to try to understand why landlords might not register their units. Through conversations and interviews with staff across the city, the office of rent control, community partners, and landlords, city officials discovered that some landlords may be unaware of the registration requirements or may have certain beliefs about the registration process that cause them to choose not to register such as the process simply being not important, and/or that the registration is too difficult or confusing to complete.
While convincing landlords who have strongly held beliefs to register their units likely requires lots of outreach or strong incentives, we’ve found that cities can more easily reach and influence those landlords that are unaware or have misconceptions about the registration process. After learning about the gap in understanding and identifying which landlords to target (work conducted with support from BIT), Newark decided that it may be able to help educate these landlords on the process that would motivate them to register their units. Because the City had limited resources available for physical outreach, the team decided to design a low-cost letter campaign to reach landlords in this group.
Given the data and information the City had gathered, the letter was designed to address the lack of awareness and false beliefs by helping to educate landlords on the registration requirement and benefits, providing instructions on the registration process, and making it easy by including the required forms.
[Check out this worksheet to replicate the evaluation that Newark conducted to see if their letter outreach campaign was successful.]
Newark adopted a few key behavioral science concepts in the letter to help improve the performance that you can too:
- A “clear call to action” and obvious deadline so landlords understand what is expected from them and by when they need to complete the task.
- Making it clear that landlords need to take action by stating failure to register will now be treated as deliberate non-compliance — presenting inaction as a deliberate choice and not the default is known as active choice framing.
- Making it clear what the consequences will be: Increasing the salience of possible enforcement consequences to further encourage compliance.
- Making it easy to apply by adding relevant registration documents to the mailing: Including the physical registration form with the letter, as well as instructions on how to complete the form, contact information for further assistance and a return envelope for mailing back the completed form. This makes it easier for landlords to complete and return the form by reducing the seemingly minor hassles — friction costs — that make the task more effortful.
Is your city looking to improve communications? For additional resources, please check out this guide for how to improve your communications.
How we know if this reminder letter worked and how cities can run their own similar evaluation and project
Newark and the Behavioral Insights Team designed and launched a randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of this simple reminder letter on landlord registration rates. They sent half of the landlords this letter; the other half (the control group) didn’t receive any letter or reminder. Then, they evaluated the impact of the letter by comparing the number of landlords who actually registered between the two groups within a set period of time. This allowed them to determine that the letter increased landlord registration compliance by 20 times more compared to the control group, and increased registrations by 1,900 units. When scaled up to send additional letters to a full group of landlords, this could mean an additional 3,000+ affordable units on the market for renters.
The Evaluation Protocol
The remaining section of this guide will walk you through a step-by-step on how to adapt this intervention and evaluate its impact in your community.
An evaluation project has four key steps:
- Scoping Your Evaluation: Identify your goals, target population, and approach
- Designing Your Evaluation: Develop your evaluation method, outcome measures, and randomization approach
- Implementing Your Evaluation: Deliver your solution, ensure everything goes to plan, and collect data
- Analyzing Your Results: Conduct data analysis based on your collected data
To design an effective evaluation of this project, Newark with the support of BIT developed an “Evaluation Protocol” to guide these four stages of their evaluation design and implementation. While sending an improved letter may seem straightforward, evaluations need to be implemented in a careful and precise way to generate results that you (and others) can learn from. Creating a protocol structures your thinking around your evaluation. Protocols keep stakeholders involved and informed, help prevent unwanted method variation and unnecessary rework, and can serve as the record of your research method. Protocols provide a convenient place to keep track of the many moving parts of your project.
Newark’s careful planning helped ensure that their evaluation ran smoothly and that they could use the results of their trial to inform decisions about their letter campaign. We’ve made it easy for you to replicate this project in your city by providing you Newark’s protocol to follow along.
Download the evaluation replication worksheet here to see Newark’s evaluation protocol and develop your own approach.
How to use your evaluation results
Congrats — you’ve implemented your evaluation, analyzed your results, and (hopefully) increased the number of available affordable units in your community! We also hope you learned about evaluation too — and have a new set of tools you can use to design evaluations in the future. The most important part of running an evaluation is using the results to make decisions and scaling up what works.
After Newark’s project with BIT, they had a few ideas of what they could do, applying what they had learned from this project:
- Continue to use the landlord mailing list to conduct an outreach mail campaign on a yearly basis.
- Communicate with individual landlords or building management companies with targeted, behavioral science-informed messages
- Send reminder registration letters to property owners who did not sign up at regular intervals (e.g., 1 month, 3 months, 6 months)
A replication story: Newark Inspires Racine’s RENTS
Similar to Newark, property owners in Racine, WI are required to register their properties to ensure affordable units are on the market and proper inspections can take place as a part of their RENTS ordinance. As a fellow city in the WWC Economic Mobility Initiative, they learned about the exciting results in Newark and decided to try out a similar project in their city.
They built off Newark’s project by developing two different messages to test out:
- A compliance-oriented letter that was styled as a formal letter and highlighted the penalties of not complying. This letter also outlined the benefits of registration from the city’s perspective.
- A service-oriented letter that was styled as an FAQ memo and highlighted the incentive offered for registration. This letter also outlined the benefits of registration from the property owner's perspective.
Check out the letter mock-ups here for inspiration!
Unlike Newark, Racine chose to have property managers register online. Both letters included a direct link to the forms rather than a physical copy of the registration form and return envelope.
Results should be available soon — but we are excited about the sharing of best practices across cities!
Launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies in April 2015, What Works Cities (WWC) is one of the largest-ever philanthropic efforts to enhance cities’ use of data and evidence. Cities across the country are more effectively driving change and delivering results for residents by participating in our What Works Cities Certification program, the standard of excellence for data-driven local government. The program’s 45 criteria outline the people, processes, and policies foundational to a well-managed city.
Want to learn more about What Works Cities? Contact certification@whatworkscities.org.
The Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) is a social purpose organization that helps governments around the world boost their impact through the application of behavioral science and rigorous evaluation techniques. As part of What Works Cities, BIT helps cities develop and rigorously evaluate ideas for improving government services. We define rigorous evaluations as evaluations that utilize experimental or quasi-experimental methods. We believe this is the best way to help understand the impact of a program or policy.
Want to learn more about the Behavioral Insights Team and services available to cities? Contact info@bi.team
