Daily Rent Needs, 1st Quarter, 2020

April 1, 2020

Requests for rent assistance in selected states have jumped by over 25,000 in less than three weeks. We examined day-by-day requests to 2-1-1 helplines for rent assistance in all or parts of 26 states for the first quarter of 2020 (top chart). We compared it to rent assistance requests in the first quarter of 2019 (bottom chart). Less than a week after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic (on March 11th), requests came flooding into 2-1-1s. In 2019, 2-1-1s in these states received 14,268 requests for rent assistance between March 12th and 31st. In 2020, the number of requests on those days almost tripled, to 39,903. Notes: the shorter bars in both charts are Saturdays and Sundays when 2-1-1s are open but receive fewer calls; states in this analysis are AL, AR, CA, CT, DE, FL, HI, IA, KY, MA, MD, ME, MN, MO, NC, NE, NJ, NV, OH, PA, SC, SD, TN, VA, WI and WY.

 

 

Contributors:  Balaji Golla, Irum Javed, Matthew Kreuter