The First Step to Solving the Housing Crisis Might Be Simpler Than You Think

Other forms of housing loss are even more of an enigma. For example, foreclosures for not paying property taxes are almost never tracked or studied. Yet in Detroit, one of the few places where this phenomenon has been studied, Detroit News reporters found that between 2008 and 2020, one third of city properties had been tax foreclosed.

And, because we have no idea how big the housing loss problem really is, America lacks a coordinated approach to fixing it, and no unified benchmarks to hold leaders accountable for their role in addressing it. By contrast, the monthly unemployment rate attracts rampant attention from the media, researchers and policymakers, and is tracked closely by the public — not only because it’s an accessible bellwether for the state of the economy, but also because it’s often viewed as a referendum on local and federal politicians’ progress in office.

If we want to tackle housing loss, we need to understand how large the problem is, where it’s occurring, and who is affected. Similar to how the unemployment rate is the most commonly used metric to gauge the state of the economy, a national housing loss rate would provide a baseline whose rise and fall reflects on the housing stability of American families. It would have to encompass the various ways that American families lose their homes each year — from eviction and foreclosure to the displacement caused by homes destroyed by natural disasters. Collecting data on each type of housing loss would require coordination between local and federal entities, since much of this data is generated at the local level.

What could a Housing Loss Rate look like? The unemployment rate is a good model.

Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts a high-quality survey of the American population, asking whether in the previous month, people have been affected by a layoff, quit for some other reason, or are working part time but want to work full time. Similarly, a national Housing Loss Rate could start with a rigorous survey of the number of people who lost their homes the prior month.

Tracking who lost their home through a survey is not without precedent. The American Housing Survey, sponsored by HUD and fielded by the U.S. Census Bureau every other year, asks about eviction and foreclosure. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey asks tens of thousands of Americans each week how confident they are in their ability to pay rent or their mortgage the following month (during much of the pandemic, between a quarter and a third of renters nationwide said they weren’t confident in being able to pay next month’s rent). The Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey — also fielded by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — collects data on who, why, and how often household members have relocated in previous years.

At the same time, it’s important to measure housing loss not just on a national level but locally — city, county and state leaders need real-time information to develop responsive housing policies, deliver targeted financial and legal assistance, and assess the impact of existing housing loss programs just as they do for job loss. The work of developing a national housing loss rate must include helping localities build and improve local housing loss databases of their own, including generating or standardizing this data in places where it does not exist.