a discussion now on housing access and affordability with officials from the housing and urban development department. they spoke at an event hosted by the bipartisan policy center. >> good afternoon, everyone. i am dennis shea. we are very grateful today to have this opportunity to discuss h.u.d.'s newly released worst case housing needs report. h.u.d. has reported on this since the mid '80s, providing an authoritative look at the critical problems facing low-income renter households. the center was founded on the idea that every american, regardless of wealth or background, should have the opportunity to live in a decent, affordable, and safe home. working towards that goal requires a rigorous understanding of the housing challenges facing america's low income households as well as an appreciation for the nationalal and regional trends in house. the worst case housing needs report is a critical tool that helps shed light on these issues. and as a former assistant secretary for the office within h.u.d., charged with producing this report for congress, i know the blood, sweat, and tears involved in analyzing and summarizing the data that informs the report. so i want to thank the h.u.d. team, particularly those in the office of policy development and research, for all their hard work. one quick note before we begin, we invite all attendees to submit questions using the live chat on youtube or facebook or on twitter, using #bpclive. the bpc team will monitor these throughout the webinar and sharing them with the speakers. let me now introduce our first speaker, peggy bailey. peggy is the senior adviser on rental assistance at h.u.d. where she works to enhance the department's rental subsidy and supply programs, which help millions of families afford housing. peggy has a long record as an advocate for low-income americans another the center on budget priorities. peggy, we appreciate you joining us today, along with all your h.u.d. colleagues. we know you are incredibly busy. thank you for taking time for this important discussion. with that, i'll turn it over to you, peggy. >> thanks, dennis. and thank you to the entire team at the bipartisan policy center for hosting today's event. and highlighting h.u.d.'s latest worst case housing needs report to congress. i also want to give a special word of appreciation to the h.u.d. team as dennis noted, especially the office of policy development and research, particularly jenna, who you will hear from in a minute. there is rarely something that comes from h.u.d. that pbnr does not touch. and jennifer and the team delivered this excellent report that many rely on to understand housing affordability or unfortunately, unaffordability. we need this policy and couldn't be more proud of the team's work. throughout the pandemic, housing has gotten a lot of attention. concerns about an increase in evictions and foreclosures, the recent increase in housing cost and the need to address housing related costs, such as utilities, broadband and quality safety concerns have all rizen to the spotlight. what our report shows is that these issues were not new. people were struggling before the pandemic. and even a strong economy with low unemployment didn't fix it. actually, it continued to get a little worse. and who is hit hardest? people with low incomes and people of color. this is why it is so important to tease out demographic data. and while the economy was strong, it shows that doesn't mean that it was equally strong for everyone. the result is that more and more households are spending bigger chunks of their paychecks on rent and leaving less for other basic needs like food, transportation, and health care. we don't know what the next report will show, but if past is prologue, it will be the same if not worse, largely due to the economic fallout due to the pandemic for so many people. how do we fix this and what are the tools we should be employing or creating today, particularly with the additional relief resources adding communities to reverse the housing affordability crisis? that's what i'm excited about for today's panel to discuss, and many other important questions. first, it's my pleasure to introduce jennifer. she's the director of the policy development division of h.u.d.'s office of policy development and research. the division's mission is to ensure the relevance of research to policy, to advise the department, and to serve as a resource for data and am sis. it produces this by biannual worst case housing needs report. prior to joining hud in 2020, she spent nearly two decades where she led numerous research studies on diverse housing and community development topics. jennifer, i'll pass it to you. >> thank you, peggy. good afternoon, everyone. i'm really pleased to provide an overknew of the worst case housing needs 2021 report to congress. thank you. the 2021 report, as dennis mentioned, is the 18th in a multidecade series, analyzing critical housing problems facing low income renter families. over the years, the report has documented scarcity in affordable housing and the roll of housing assistance and su fly in addressing that scarcity. the authors of this report work with me in the policy development division at hud. and i would like to take a moment to express my appreciation for the hard work they put in this report, as well as for the many years working on the worst case housing needs report. the report can be found at huduser.org. the report analyzes data from the american housing survey. it is sponsored by hud and conducted by the census bureau, collected since 1973 and every two years since 1984. it's a housing survey that provides the cost of financing and maintaining homes and the characteristics of the people who live in the homes. the data are typically ready for release 9 to 12 months after the survey field work is complete. and hud then requires some additional time to analyze the results. so the report is based on 2019 data. this is a key contextual factor, because the data were collected before the start of the covid-19 pandemic. is what does it mean to have a worst case housing need? worst case needs households are renter households who don't receive housing assistance, who have incomes at our below 50% of the area median income or paying more than 50% of their household income on rent or living in severely inadequate housing or are experiencing both of these problems. in 2019, as in previous years, 95% of households with worst case needs had worst case needs only because they had severe rent burden. meaning they were paying more than one half of their income for rent. one thing to note is that people experiencing homelessness are not included in the counts of worst case needs households. people experiencing homelessness have great need for housing, but they're not counted in the survey as they cover only housing you believes and the households that live in them. in 2019, 7.77 million renter households experienced worst case housing needs. this is a statistically insignificant increase. worst case needs have generally declined since 2011, when they peaked at 8.48 million households. however, there's still about 2 million more households with worst case needs in 2019 than in the early 2000s when there was more affordable housing available. of the 7.7 million households -- 7.77 million households with worst case needs, about three quarters are extremely low income, meaning they have incomes 30% at or below the median area income. the charts i'm presenting today have been refermatted. at the bottom of each slide you will see a note in blue identifying the relevant exhibit in the report. this exhibit shows the results of our analysis of the relative influence of the factors driving change in worst case needs between 2017 and 2019. starting from the left hand side, we see an increase in worst case needs of 159,000 households, attributable to new household formation. the results of population growth. shifts in tenure toward home ownership over the two-year period reduce worst case needs by about 45,000 households, because the growth in renter households lacked the growth in homeowner households. in the third column, you can see the changes in renter household income increased worst case needs by about 20,000, because there was a net increase of very low income renters. worst case needs also increased by an estimated 135,000, because housing assistance became scarcer, relative to the expanding number of very low income renters. in other words, the rental assistance gap widened. counteracting all of these factors pushing worst case needs up was a modest expansion in the rental housing supply over this period, reducing the competition for affordable units. the increase in rental housing reduced worst case needs by 218,000, which if turn reduced the net increase needs to just 50,000. so this slide shows the number of households with worst case needs in 2019, across different racial and ethnic groups. about 3.6 million of the 7.77 million households with worst case needs were non-hispanic households. 1.9 million hispanic households. other races and ethnicities totaled about 210,000 households. on this slide, the blue bars show the share of very slow income renter households that experienced worst case needs in 2019. the orange bars show the share of all households within each group that experienced worst case needs in 2019. so you can see from the chart that the rate at which households experienced worst case needs varied by race and ethnicity. native hawaiian and pacific islander households had the highest rates of worst case needs. at 55% of very low income renters and 13% of all households. next highest were asian and hispanic households. black non-hispanic households had a low rate of worst case needs at 36%. this reflects the relatively high rate of housing assistance among very low income black renters. however, if you look at the orange bar, the rate of worst case needs for all black households was 10%. this reflects the fact that a much higher share of black households are very low income and rent their housing rather than own. this chart illustrates the vital role that housing assistance plays in preventing households from experiencing worst case needs. in the exhibit, central cities are shown by blue bubbles, suburbs by purple, and nonmetro area by green bubbles. larger bubbles represent a larger national share of worse case needs households. across regions in metro locations, housing assistance is correlated with worse case needs. locations in the upper left quadrant of the chart, such as nonmetro areas have higher than average levels of housing assistance and work space needs and by contrast, in the lower right quadrant, suburban areas in the south have lower rates of housing assistance, leading to higher rates of worse case needs. so, we noted earlier 95% of households with worse case needs in 2019 had worse case needs only because they had severe rent burden. given that they're largely an affordability problem, access is critical for addressing the problem. over the past 20 years, the unmet needs for decent space and affordable housing says you need out space growth and the affordability of government to facilitate house progduction. this results in a housing supply mismatch, which is severe for extremely low-income renters. it's exacerbated because they occupy many of the units for extremely low income renters. on the chart, the orange line shows the number of housing units available for every number of low-income households and those available for every 100 extremely low income household. in 2019, there were only 62 units affordable and available per 100 very low income renters. the supply of housing was even more constrained for extremely low income renters with only 40 units available for every 100 households. extremely low income renters did not benefit much from the modest growth of housing supply in 2017 and 2019. so this report contains a special addendum on the potential effects of the covid-19 pandemic on worse case needs. you'll recall the data in the report from 2019. so they were collected prior to the pandemic. as we all know, the pandemic caused an economic recession and negative shocks to many household's income. at the same time, federal policy involved significant household subsidies and eviction moratorium intended to mitigate the most negative effects. it's not clear how the pandemic might effect worse case needs, as documented in the 2021 ahs. note that the 2021 data collection took place this past spring and summer and is now wrapping up. so, the addendum to the report discusses the major federal relief law that could affect rent payments this year, such as the cares act, the covid-19 relief bill and the american rescue plan. the addendum also analyzes data on rental payments and eviction collected during the pandemic through the house survey. and then the adendms include, with an exercise where we try to estimate the effects of federal relief on work space needs for a hypothetical household. i know this is incredibly dense but i encourage you to look at it at your leisure. the idea is to try to think about the numerous factors that might affect the level and measure of worst case needs. this table examines the pandemic's impact for a hypothetical family of four with two minimum wage workers who lost their job during the pandemic. and it considers how the age might treat their needs. so, like other major surveys, generally counts pretax money income. it doesn't count post tax income, nonrecurring income or benefits, such as food assistance. the values shown in brackets, represent income sources not captured by the ahs. the first numeric column of the table presents data for the family after the pandemic and they loses employment but receives federal pandemic benefits. the enhanced unemployment insurance benefits have the potential to leave our hypothetical family better off in terms of pretax income. but post tax income would not change a great deal. the households estimating cost burden would fall below the 50% threshold and trigger the worse case needs. they would no longer count as having worse case needs because the unemployment benefits exceeded their pretax incomes as minimum wage workers. on an after-tax basis, the family's tax burden would not change much between the scenarios and continue to qualify as moderate housing costs. this is by no means definitive and it contains a lot of assumptions. it does illustrate how it can be complicated to predict how the pandemic and federal response will affect work space needs as captured in the american housing survey. what is clear from our 2021 worse case needs report, as peggy mentioned, is even before the pandemic hit in 2019, this country had a large and persistent housing affordability problem that disproportionately effected low-income households and households of color. reducing worse case needs requires both demand and supply side solutions. such as increasing the incomes of very low income renters, expanding rental assistance, preserving the existing assisted housing -- the existing assisted and affordable housing stock, and reducing barriers to the production of new affordable housing. we appreciate your interest in this year's housing needs report and i'm greatly looking forward to the panel's discussion. with that, i will introduce ben winter, who will moderate the discussion. ben winter rejoined hud as deputy assistant secretary in the office of policy development and research. ben oversees the office of policy work in assessing the policy relevance of hud research and analyzing legislative proposals and disseminating research findings and in managing the international and philanthropic engagement. before coming to hud, he led the california community foundation housing and economic opportunity initiatives in los angeles and he was the chief housing officer for the city of los angeles. in these roles, he worked on strengthening low-income communities to address homelessness and to grow the region 's affordable housing supply. over to you, ben. >> good afternoon. thank you, jennifer, for that presentation. also thank you for your leadership. it is a joy and a pleasure to work with you every day. i wanted to say thank you to the staff and you know, i'm in awe of what you're able to pull off and really love working with you all. is thank you all for joining the discussion. i'm excited to introduce all our panelist and start a chat with them. here they are on the screen. we have chris herbert joining us, the managing director of a harvard voice center for housing studies and a lecturer at harvard graduate school of design. we're super lucky to have him here because he leads the team that writes the state of the nation's housing report and the biannual america housing report. so, two key resources for understanding housing markets in this country. really excited to get his thoughts on the panel. we also have robin hughes zooming in from los angeles, california. hello, robin. she is the president and executive director of the community. that is a prolific affordable housing developer in california. and robin has been involved in community development for more than 30 years now. and we're really excited to see her bring a local and state and housing development perspective to the panel. we also have dennis shea, who you've already heard from today from the bipartisan center, the executive director of the brand new center for housing policy. and i'm really excited to have dennis on the panel to share his expertise. because out of who you've probably had the most history with in the office. so, welcome, dennis. and finally, last but not least, we have ann. she's the vice president for housing policy at the center for budget and policy priorities. i'm also a hud alum as well. she served as the deputy assistant secretary for special needs, an office that focuses in on the lowest income band that we're going to be discussing today on the panel. and she's also spent time as a senior advisor at the corporation for affordable housing. so, thank you so much. so, to get us started, i want to take a step back and reflect a little bit about why this report matters, why do we keep doing it and i'm going to offer and give us your insights first, since you spent the most time on this report. why do you think we should produce this every two years and investing in the underlying american housing survey that helps us glean all these data points in the report. >> thank you, ben. and i do want to tip my hat to barry as well. i worked with barry back in the day. but to answer your question, let me start by telling you about the new center. our missions is to promote bipartisan policies that advance housing affordability for all. and you cannot really do this unless you understand the housing needs of the lowest income americans, as well as the trends in housing on a national and regional level. and the data provided by the american housing survey, as interpreted by hud is critical to this understanding. ron reminds us that the housing affordability challenge has two dimensions. you have the supply side dimension and the demand side dimension. now, what we learned from the worse case housing needs report is there's a severe shortage of affordable rental homes. we heard jennifer's presentation. only 62 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 very low-income renters and just 40 available and affordable rental homes for every 100 extremely low income renters. so, there's a severe shortage of affordable rental homes, which we need address in the nation. on the demand side, what do we learn from the worse case housing needs report? we learn that fewer rental households receive housing assistance and 7.77 million renter households who are very low income, who have worse case housing needs. meaning they pay in excess of 50% of their income just on housing costs. and that produces incredibly difficult trade offs between paying monthly rent and buying health care, food, supporting your kid's education. the data provided by the american housing survey and interpreted by the worse case needs report at hud is incredible. jennifer mentioned about the american housing survey created -- launched in 1973. it's done every two years. biannual assessment of housing units throughout the united states and the people who live in those housing units. what are their characteristics? before that existed, before we had the american housing survey too, learn about the situation in the united states, we primarily relied on the census and that occurs, of course, every ten years. that's if you're trying to get something close to a semblance of a real time understanding of what's going on in housing in the nation. i hope congress continues to support the american housing survey, continues direct at hud to create the worse case housing needs report. this is a report to congress. i hope it continues to insist that hud do this and just want to have these two valuable documents for anyone working the field and wants to understand and appreciate what's going on in housing. >> thank you, dennis. and what about you? you're zooming in from another housing policy think tank, or organization. from your perspective, what is the value of this report and why should we be continuing to track worse case housing needs as a nation? >> thank you, ben. and i want to start by saying thank you so much for having me today. and for giving me the opportunity to talk about this report and answer the question of why it's so important. and i'm going to pick two different groups here. so, bear with me for a moment. and at the center on budgetl and policy priorities, which is where i am now, we consider this data incredibly valuable. we cite this report and the number it provides. i can't tell you how many slide decks i have that have data from this report included. as an indicator of housing needs generally across the country. and who it most impacted by worse case housing. we really -- we use that data -- all the time. it is incredibly important to our advocacy and our estimate that only one out of every four eligible households for housing choice vouchers actually get one is related to that particular data. it is incredibly important to us from an analytical point of view. but i'm going to go down another way for just a second. i've had the privilege of working both at the national and federal levels as well as the local level over the last few years. and i can tell you and the audience that this data forms the basis of key policy resource allocations and program design decisions and informed discussions across the affordable housing spectrum, all the way from homelessness assistance to affordable housing development and rental assistance. and let me just give you a real example of how this might play out. jennifer mentioned a moment ago that people experiencing homelessness are not actually included in the report. they're not actually and this data provides really important information to cities and counties and states across the country when they're thinking about their homelessness assistance resources. there's been an increase in unfiltered homelessness across the country when we see the next 800, there will be the next years, especially on the west coast and also in lots of places around the country. i know a couple of you stay on the west coast. put a note in the fact that we're seeing that on the west coast. we also know the solution to homelessness is safe and affordable housing with community support. but at the local level, what often happens is conversations, as folks get frustrated with seeing increased encampments and homelessness in particular, those conversations can start to blame an individual for some sort of perceived shortcomings, rather than understanding homelessness and housing instability as systemic issues that need system level, equity-based solutions. so, the data that we're talking about today, hoped to tell the story of how all these things connect, both nationally and at the local level. and what i was struck by when i was reading the report this year is the difference, really, between extremely low income households and households in other income brackets and how it accounts for 74% of the worse case housing cases and that's something we haven't seen since 2005. so, we need all of this data to understand that dynamic and how to allocate resources, build policy and design programs to the reality of what we're seeing, both on the housing instability side and on the homelessness side. and i'll note, earlier i said something about increases in encampments and increase homelessness on the west coast and you'll see an increase in worse case housing needs in the west, and i don't think that's a coincidence. this data tells the story of how all of these factors are connected and really drives home why we need to work together across systems using an equity-based approach to address all of those needs. >> thank you. really good insights. you alluded to how this report can play into local conversations, right? and so, i want to turn to you and see if you would like to reflect a little bit about why is it important for us to focus on worse case housing needs, especially in the local context. >> thank you. for having me here today. this is a critically important topic, especially as ann has noted. and we should see increasing homelessness among low income and extremely low income households. i'm going to pick up on what ann was talking about earlier. i can talk about what i see on a project level, individual level, portfolio level. but what the data does is help us tell our story and at some point, define our story, which is great. it helps us and local advocacy and in terms of taking the data and what we know from our own experience, we experience that supply and demand that was talked about earlier when we're receiving five times the number of applications as we have available units. it clearly demonstrates this need for more affordable housing. we're able to point back to this data and say that's not unique to this one experience or opportunity. that's the data for los angeles. or for california. whatever that might be. think about who we serve as an affordable housing developer. we take our information in los angeles. that's where we want to target our mission and resources. and what this report does is put a shining light on where policy and pral alternatives should be. it's very clear that the market is not going to produce housing for extremely low and low income households. so there has to be government intervention in that so we can point to this data to say, our local resources should be targeted the homelessness situation that we have here, now as well as extremely low income housing so we don't have more and more people slipping into homelessness. again, it helps to define our stories and determine where the policy and program direction should go. we see this in los angeles all the time is the way in which low and long-term interest compensate for the high cost of housing is by overcrowding. and we off see a family of four living in a one bedroom apartment or multiple households renting a two bedroom apartment and one family sleeping in each room, plus the living room. or you have a garage that's been converted. that's another way of measuring the impact that high-cost areas like los angeles and how we are addressing the housing crisis and how they're impacted. it's great if the report looks into that. thank you. >> thank you, robin. chris herbert, we're going to give you the mic and you've spent a lot of time on different affordability metrics and examining needs across the country. what makes this report different? what's the value add for this report for the community? how does it fit into the broader research world? >> yeah, happy to answer that and the anticipation waits for the report to come out because it is so valuable. three things i want to it measures household income and categories that map the policy. overall, in general it starts with categorizing households. when you think about household size, that's a valuable building block for the analysis. the second thing that's really unusual is it's able to take into account who is receiving housing assistance. and when we look at who's experiencing worse case needs, it factors out the fact that some are getting the benefit of a voucher or subsidy or public housing. we can take into account whether or not how people are being able to access the assistance and to what extent is that helping meet the need for affordable, decent housing. and lastly, the measure the housing quality and we don't talk very much about housing quality these days because it's how much less of an issue than it was 50 years ago. but for families in severely inadequate housing. this is housing that lacks complete plumbing, may lack electricianty or exposed wiring, holes in the floors and walls. so, when we talk about severely inadequate, we're talking about challenging to inhabit. it's a problem i think that's overlooked and the fact this report takes advantage of that information that's really only available in the american housing surveys, it paints a portrait of the nation's needs for housing assistance that is second to none. >> okay. so, it sounds like i'm hearing consensus that this report is valuable enough that we can continue to do it every two years. i agree. and let's talk a little bit about the actual findings and what you're taking away from the findings this year. for me, the biggest takeaways are the prevalence of worse case housing needs. it hasn't really budged in he cent years. especially for extremely low-income renters. the factors driving that are shortage of rental assistance, a weak growth in the supply of housing that creates more competition. and that we have free flowing growth, especially at the lower income. a lot has changed with the pandemic since 2019. and chris, i want to kind of follow along with you. i know you've been putting out new research on the impacts of the pandemic. you think these three factors that are the driving factor between worse case housing needs? what else is happening by the pandemic you might think are effecting worse case needs? >> i think the pandemic, in many respects is, is exacerbating the drivers. by undermining people's ability to make a living, that perspective. and initially rents were falling in the first phases of the pandemic. oddly, we had a housing crisis going up and rents falling. but now rents are going up quite rapidly. helping to drive the overall ppi to quite high levels. so, supply side and demand side are both exacerbated by the pandemic. one thing that i would -- that we don't have good data on but seems clear to be one of the outcomes of the pandemic is on housing quality. there's been a variety of studies. some from the urban institute and the turner center at berkley and looked at the impact on particularly small landlords and the inability of renters to make rent has put stress on particularly affordable unsubsidized housing units and landlords have to cutback in maintenance in particular. and missed payments on the mortgages and property taxes. more are considering putting their properties on the market. it's creating a lack of investment and instability among the affordable, unsubsidized housing stock that will exacerbate worse case needs. >> in terms of where the need for low income housing is needed. you know, here in los angeles, the california housing partnership corporation produces a housing need report locally or statewide and in local regions. so in los angeles, we're probably about 65% renters. we're very much a renter region. about 68% are rent burdened. that's compared to about 2% of moderate. so i would only imagine that that continues to be the same post pandemic, that just a shortage of available apartments and places to rent in los angeles have just been further impacted by the pandemic. we also need to produce or have available about 800,000 units for renters here in los angeles. right now we have a shortage of 500,000 units. again, because we're probably only produce at best 5,000 units a year in the county, that just because he needs to grow for post pandemic, we're still just having a shortage of overall units available to us. you know, in our affordable housing portfolio in terms of residents impacted by the pandemic from an economic stand point, we did a survey last year around this time, and these 69%, 70% of the residents living in our affordable housing units had been impacted from an economic standpoint. so i definitely see that the recession hits, and people that are working and reach out, hospitality, those are the jobs that are impacted. and those are the types of families living in our affordable housing. and then lastly, in terms of i think our biggest concern is what will happen after the moratoriums are lifted here in los angeles. but i believe the available resources for rent relief in california may meet like 65% of the overall need. so that's going to have a significant impact on low income residents post pandemic, as well. >> so you already started to move the conversation into policy levers. we know we have this need, it's a stubborn need. it seems to have grown since -- in recent years. and we know that the pandemic has exacerbated the needs. we also have a new administration in place, and that congress, they're debating right now how the federal government can address these needs. and i'm looking at you, ann, to see if you can talk to us about what you think are the most important proposals out there right now that could help address this need. >> yeah. thanks for that question. it's something i've been spending a lot of time on recently. we talk about this quite a bit. i want to start by saying what we hope to see in the long run is a permanent solution around affordable housing. as we work our way towards housing, universal housing, universal vouchers, we need to consider incremental steps. the universal vouchers, which means everyone eligible for a housing voucher would get one, ultimately what we want to be aiming at right now. ultimately what we want to be aiming at. right now, we have a number of things in front of us that we want to take advantage of. and like many of the other speakers, for build back better in particular, which is under discussion to be effective, housing has to be included, affordable housing has to be included, and it has to address supply needs and affordability. for many people in the audience, you probably know that the center is particularly focused in three areas. increasing supply through investments in the national housing trust fund. making improvements to the current public housing stock and i think most importantly from our point of view is a significant increase in rental assistance through housing choice voucher expansion. as a reason we're focussed on these three areas and how it's tied to the report is they're resources highly targeted to the population. this report are facing the greatest challenges in getting and maintaining space in affordable housing. so, we really need to focus on those who need help the most and that includes people at extremely -- who are at extremely low incomes, who have disabilities. seniors. i saw questions in the chat about seniors, working families and children. we need to use an equity based targeted universal approach to insure the system works for communities of color and lgbtq people who have been subject to racist and discriminatory practices in the past and i think we have a real opportunity to do that with this legislation. if it includes housing and a package that addresses both supply and affordability. >> thanks. supply and affordability, two big policy levers at the federal level. what do you think are some of the hot-ticket items that you'd like to talk about? >> yes, i work at the bpc and it -- the "b" stands for bipartisan. the good news is there are a lot of ideas, lot of initiatives on the table in washington that enjoy bipartisan support, that can make a difference, that can help solve the -- or at least mitigate the housing affordability challenge. one of them, of course, is the expansion of the low-income housing tax credit, which has been the nation's most successful program to encourage private investment in their preservation and construction of new affordable rental units for lower income people. expanding the tax credit, making a more effective program is something that enjoys bipartisan support in congress. secondly, there's a neighborhood homes improvement act, which would incentivize crowd private investment in the rehab and new construction of homes for first-time home buyers in distressed communities who are low income. and this bill, estimates about 500,000 homes could be created over the next ten years. enjoys bipartisan support in congress and would address the issue, which we haven't talked about in the worse case needs report about the crowding out effect, about how the lowering some households are often crowded out from accessing a unit of five people and higher income bracket. if you created, for the higher income folks, the opportunity to become first-time home buyers, that should provide more relief for the lower -- people on the lower income scale, seeking to access the rental market. neighborhood homes improvement act is another idea that enjoys bipartisan support. reinvesting -- and ann talked about public housing. very important. reinvesting, modernizing our public housing stock, which is an important source of affordable housing is critical and many republicans support something called the rental assistance demonstration program, which brings the private capital into help support the public housing stock. one idea on the table is competitive grants program to encourage community reform there, local zoning and lows to enable production of more affordable housing. and that idea of regulatory barrier remove, regulatory reform also enjoys republican support, bipartisan support. so, that's the good news. the bpc ten years ago had a housing commission that supported an expansion of the voucher program to make sure all eli households get access to it. they supported the creation of a permanent program at the federal level for emergency, one-time emergency assistance for renters who potentially face eviction. so, i guess the point i want to make is that there are a lot of things in congress being talked about in congress on housing enjoy support from people across the -- on both parties. on both parties. before i go, one thing that struck me in this report is significant increase in worse case needs among older renters, ages 62 and above. there's a 607,000 additional low-income -- additional worse case needs among older renters and i think this is something we need to be focussed on, as america ages, as the population, percentage of the population is focusing on the needs of older renters. and whether, you know, our homes is suitable for that. suitability might be something we ought to be looking at as well as adequacy. are they suitable for an older population? but thank you. i'll leave it at that. >> thanks for highlights the need for older adults. robin, what do you think can be the role for state and local governments and actors that play two address worst case housing needs? >> well, ben, i can't overemphasize the need to bring federal dollars to the local level, especially in california, where unfortunately, we are constrained by the ability to tax here in our state. so by proposition 13, so having those federal dollars are critical. but i think at the state and local level, it's probably the same theme as levers as ann and dennis mentioned. at the state of california, i am part of the california housing consortium, the state-wide organization, and we also collaborate with housing california, and there's a big push to get state -- another state-wide bond on the ballot at a larger amount this time. $10 billion, and i think it really is creating resources at a level that's going to be sufficient to address the problem. so we keep passing these smaller bond initiatives, but we need to get to a larger level. and so having a bond issuance that is sufficient over an extended period of time is really critical. and california, we're lucky enough to have a state credit program, so to the extent that our state legislature can look at making that a permanent opportunity to produce affordable housing and particularly targeting extremely low income folks, that would be great. the other tool that of course the state has is land use and zoning, and in california, we have seen a number of bills to streamline the production of affordable housing throughout the state. so one that hasn't quite gotten through the legislature is allowing residential zoning with a priority to affordable housing within commercial areas, so it's sort of odd that some of our cities throughout california do not allow that. so those are really wonderful opportunities. locally, it's very similar. we have a housing trust fund here in los angeles, and we need to continue to fund it at an appropriate level. to deliver housing here in the state. there is also a push this legislative period to create a special housing agency that would actually cover the county of los angeles and have both bonding and land use authority again to further streamline how we produce affordable housing throughout our county and state level. and within those programs, there's also how they're prioritizing, whether it's funding or streamlining, insuring that there's an incentive to actually fund extremely low and low income housing, and that becomes a priority. and you know, as ann mentioned, making sure that there is equity land associated with it. and lastly, zoning. you know, we still have so much r-1 zoning where you can only build one residential unit. we need to think about how to create zoning that increases density at an appropriate level to get more housing built. to take the pressure off of the market. so if you can build a ten-unit apartment, perhaps that takes a little bit of pressure throughout the city, that takes a little bit of the pressure to build 100-unit, 200-unit developments, so balancing out the zoning throughout the city. >> thanks. so no shortage of levers at the state and local level either. lots to do on the agenda. there is so many other findings from this report that we could unpack. there's a lot in here. and we don't have a lot of time. but i did want to kind of throw a question out to the floor here. you know, the report unpacks the unequal incidents of worst case needs by geography. it reports the unequal distribution by race and ethnicity. talks a little bit about the need by disability status. there's a lot in here, so broad question. what other findings in there do you think you would like to raise up and elevate and discuss with your peers here? and this is to anybody, really. >> i'm happy to start and just raise up some of the data that's presented around race and ethnicity. you heard me a couple times now talk about using an equity-based approach and insuring that we're targeting these resources that we might be getting or the resources that we have in the best way that we can. so recently, i have had the opportunity to work with the urban institute. we did some mapping around need for the emergency rental assistance program in particular. and when we released the maps on twitter, we had a number of folks come back to us and say, the highest need areas in the map based on the indices you were using to determine need including housing need, race and covid impact, overlap quite a bit with those -- the maps that show historic redlining practices. and in a lot of cases, either they overlap or there has been some sort of impact around gentrification. we're going to be digging into that more over the next six months. but i think, you know, one of the things i just wanted to say out loud is that folks who are experiencing worst case housing needs and who are highly impacted really, those neighborhoods are often reflective of those racist housing practices like redlining and covenants and disinvestment in communities. and again, this goes back to the theme i was trying to point out at the beginning, which is really these are all cross-cutting, these are cross-cutting issues that need a racial equity lens applied to them so we can have the best impact that we can have. and it's not just about the money. it's a lot about the money, but it's not just about the money. it's about how we approach the policy. it's about asking people who are closest to the challenge and to the problem what they want and need and designing policies for those folks. it's about doing things like getting rid of discrimination around source of income, so all of these things are tied together, and this report sort of nicely points to some of those things that we need to consider as we're thinking about racial justice and equity in a broader sense. >> ben, if i might just -- in terms of the geographic variation, one of the graphics in the report that i really like was the chart showing the association between the share of households with assistance and the incidents of worst case needs. obviously, if you count someone receiving assistance as not having worst case needs, there's going to be an inverse relationship there, but there are strong geographic variations, the northeast, the midwest in particular, tend to have higher levels of assistance. i think one takeaway from that is the value of supply side subsidies as gifts that keep on giving, and one reason why the northeast and the midwest have higher shares of assisted households is because they played in all of the housing production programs going back to the 1930s. important foundation for assistance. -- it is important but we build an infrastructure has lasting variety. you can't just assume that and perhaps the court does because it has to -- that the people who have worse -- have worse needs. and we are concerned about the quality of older public housing. i think we need a more nuanced view of the quality of that housing. and african americans actually have lower rates of worst-case needs and that's primarily because they have high rates of assistance. and -- in public housing. not all of that public housing is well located, or good quality housing. -- , multiple households living i spent a lot of time -- and the climate change into the future. and how do these intersect then we will start with closing remarks. that's open to anyone. >> i will yield the floor to someone else. >> they are going to be affected by ocean levels rising. the issue may not be housing affordability. the issue may be housing. so this is something we should be looking at and paying attention to. >> more discussion on that another time. thanks so much to our panelists for lending us your time. your words of wisdom. and also thank you all to our viewers. i will hand it over to peggy bailey. >> thanks, ben. on behalf of secretary budge i want to thank the bipartisan policy center for hosting us again today. and i want to thank you for attending. this report shows that, as our presenters highlighted, there is a need to increase rental assistance. the impacts of racism. the outsized representation. and the key component of the build back better agenda. while the crisis is multifaceted, it isn't impossible to -- other programs and federal assistance works if persons are able to receive it. and we need to take a variety of resources today and feature resources. housing is foundational for all of us. i hope today's discussion energizes you all and the work you are doing to not accept the status quo when it comes to housing. thank you again for hearing today's discussion. arizona senator mark kelly says that western states are experiencing the worst drought in more than 1000 years. he and others held a committee where they heard from environmental experts on the drought.

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