Milestone: 250,000 housing requests

A quarter million calls for help. With more Americans missing rent and mortgage payments due to the economic fallout from COVID-19, 2-1-1s passed another milestone. Last week, we published a report on 2-1-1s responding to 200,000 requests for housing assistance since the pandemic began. Twelve days later, on May 5th, 2-1-1s passed 250,000 requests for housing assistance. Call operators across the country have responded to over 4,500 requests for housing assistance per day since the pandemic began, and that only counts requests from 2-1-1s participating in the daily tracking system. In contrast, during the same time period last year, 2-1-1s responded to approximately 3,000 request for assistance each day. Analysis included data from 2-1-1s covering all of 24 states (AL, AR, CT, DE, FL, HI, IA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, NE, NJ, NV, NY, PA, SC, SD, VA, WA, WI and WY ) and parts of 7 others (CA, IL, IN, KS, KY, OH and TN). Two states (MI, WA) did not have data for 2019.

Contributors: Rachel Garg, Balaji Golla, Irum Javed, Matthew Kreuter