Evaluating the Impact of Temporary Rental Assistance in Denver, Colorado

Nearly 12 million households in the U.S. spend over half their income on housing costs. The government funds a number of subsidized housing programs for very low-income households, but these programs are vastly oversubscribed. One of the only other available supports is temporary rental assistance, which provides short-term cash assistance (typically paid directly to landlords) to help low-income renters pay off back-owed rent. Despite the fact that temporary rental assistance is one of the only available policy levers for preventing homelessness and evictions, and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on these programs each year, there is little experimental evidence on their effectiveness. In collaboration with the Denver Department of Housing Stability, we will conduct a randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of temporary rental assistance on evictions, residential mobility, homelessness, and survey-based measures of wellbeing including financial, housing, and food security. With a sample of over 5,400 households and individual-level application data, including race, ethnicity, and income, we will also be able to examine heterogeneous effects by applicant characteristics. The findings from this study will directly inform Denver’s programming and, importantly, will generate insights that will be applicable for housing stabilization programs and agencies across the country.