The pandemic is hitting Black renters harder, Census data shows
Black renters in Washington state are falling behind on rent at much higher rates than whites, according to data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Since April, the bureau has been sending out a Census Pulse Household Surveys each week to about 2 million renter households across the state.
Throughout the month of June, between 27% and 48% of Black renter households reported being unable to pay their rent. That’s compared to 8%-10% for white renters. Nonpayment among Latino renters was between 12% and 24%.
Deepening existing inequalities
Historically, the Black unemployment rate has consistently been twice as high as white unemployment in the United States.
Research has shown that even when controlling for education, Black Americans have lower net worth, which scholars refer to as the racial wealth gap.
“We’re seeing that [COVID-19] has affected black renters more now because a lot of people that are being put out of their jobs, those are jobs that marginalized people and Black people are employed at, and when they’re put out of jobs they have no money to pay their rent,” said Ty Brown, a community organizer with Washington Community Action Network and a member of Black Leaders in Action and Solidarity in Thurston County (BLAST).
“So the fact that Black renters are being affected is an intersection of issues surrounding systemic racism that’s been at play for many, many years,” Brown said. “It’s more apparent now because COVID has highlighted that situation.”
Housing and inequality
To understand why the economic crisis is disproportionately affecting Black renters, you have to look at how wealth has been unequally passed down through generations, says Savvina Chowdhury, a faculty member at The Evergreen State College who teaches feminist economics.
“Housing is the primary way that American working-class families have been able to build their wealth,” Chowdhury said.
After World War II, the U.S. government subsidized home ownership by providing low-interest mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration.
“The thing about those great FHA loans: because they kept the interest rates low, your mortgage payments were low enough that for many working-class families, it was cheaper to buy a house and pay a mortgage than it was to pay rent, and that is true today,” Chowdhury said.
Black families, however, were systematically excluded from this process based on a risk-assessment mapping tool that designated Black neighborhoods as higher risk for investment, essentially instructing lenders not to loan to Black households. Those federal housing policies are commonly known as redlining, preventing Black families from building wealth through homeownership, and those policies continue a legacy today.
In Thurston County, 40% of Black households are homeowners, compared to 69% of white households, according to the 2017 Thurston County Fair Housing Assessment Report.
When it comes to evictions, research has shown that Black renters also are more likely to be evicted than whites.
In a review of all eviction filings in Seattle in 2017, for example, 31% were filed against Black tenants, despite the fact that Seattle’s population is only 7% Black.
The study, conducted by the King County Bar Association and the Seattle Women’s Commission, also found that among tenants of color who owe less than $1,000, Black tenants were more likely to be evicted than white tenants who owe the same amount of money.
Equity in rent assistance
At the beginning of August, the Washington state Department of Commerce began rolling out a program to provide $100 million in rent assistance to counties across the state.
The program’s guidelines are attempting to account for some of that history of racial discrimination in how it distributes relief.
According to the program’s guidelines, each county is required to distribute a minimum amount of funds to racial and ethnic minorities based on the percentage of each population that earns below the federal poverty line.
This story was originally published August 17, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
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