 New America would like to welcome you to our virtual event. The program will begin momentarily. While we are waiting, I want to review a few housekeeping notes. This event is being recorded and a recording will be posted to the New America events page within 48 hours after the event. Attendees will be in listen only mode and you will not be able to be seen or heard by your fellow attendees or panelists. Therefore, we encourage you to share your comments and questions in the Q&A and chat features which can be found at the bottom of the screen. Thank you for joining us. We will begin momentarily. Over to you Anne-Marie. Welcome everyone. I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter. I'm the CEO of New America and welcome to our event on a new report entitled Displaced in America. New America is very proud of this work and I actually want to start with the title, The Idea of Displaced in America. My own field is foreign policy. One of the great global problems that we face is that there are over 60 million refugees and internally displaced people around the world. When we talk about that problem, at least American foreign policy experts do not include the United States. But actually, the United States has its own issue with internally displaced people, people who are taken, cast out, evicted, foreclosed upon so that they no longer have a home. It's not the same kind of displacement that happens from civil conflict or crimes against humanity, but it is an enormous problem. And one of the great virtues of this report is that it pulls together a number of sources to talk about the phenomenon of being displaced, losing your house. Before I say a little bit more about the report, I do want to also say that I'm very pleased that we are working with so many partners. This is the way forward for organizations like ours and all of us in the civic sector to have more impact. I am speaking to you from Princeton, New Jersey, where I have been since March. Right down the street from me is Matthew Desmond's eviction lab. I read his book evicted a year ago and was profoundly moved and and and really overwhelmed by the realization, as some people have said, that what incarceration is it to in communities of color for men and for white communities. Eviction is for women, a hugely disruptive life event for for the person who owns holds the lease but of course for the entire family. So we have partnered formally with data kind, which we're delighted to do our own a full of Bruce is now there. And also with the metropolitan areas of Indianapolis Winston Salem and Phoenix. Those have been our formal partners informally we've worked closely with the eviction lab with the Urban Institute with the National low income housing coalition. The Grounded Solutions Network, Esri policy map and multiple universities. So it took a village it took a crowd to bring you this work, but that is very much the way we should be working. So what is new in this report is that we have taken data data on evictions and much of which we have really worked very closely with the eviction lab. But we've combined it with data on foreclosures. There are many ways to lose your house and eviction for renters foreclosure when you own your house. And of course there are also more informal means which we have not tracked but putting these sources of data together allows us to come up with a single measure of loss which we have calculated and then mapped. So it is a housing loss rate. And we have ranked a number of US counties, according to the severity of housing loss. If you are a family who has lost your home. It doesn't matter so much how it is an extraordinary disruption if you are a child. It means you now have to go to a different school or if you're at the same school maybe you're now trying to do your homework from a homeless shelter or from a relative's home. Just think of what that means for everything that we do that is premise on the idea that we have a stable home. So this report takes this measure of a housing loss rate and looks across the country at specific areas to to bring together that data and talk about where we see it most. It does not surprise you that when we do that we discover of course that that rate of housing loss is tangled up with so many other sources of discrimination and poverty and oppression of inability to climb up in the way that we promise people if they work hard enough in this country, they should be able to climb up. We talk a lot about systemic racism and we are right to that racism goes far beyond the actions of individual people that it is woven into the system. When we look at housing loss, we similarly see systems interacting not only systems systemic racism, but zoning and school where school financing and of course other measures that intersect with the inability of people to pay rent or to make payments on a house and suddenly to end up homeless. I'm about to turn it over to our the mayor of Tempe, but beforehand I want to just close for a minute by by talking about new America's mission more broadly. Our mission is to renew the promise of America by holding the country or continuing the quest to hold the country to its highest ideals. Right now, the gap between the ideals we profess and the reality that millions and millions of Americans are living is very, very wide. That promise of America is the promise that all human beings are created equal with equal and inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Think about how central having a home is to your ability to live to live healthily to to live productively your freedom to be able to move about and pursue your goals and obviously to any notion of the pursuit of happiness. So this report and what it has brought together and the idea of being displaced being moved out of your home and having continually to try to find another one is very much at the heart of a number of systems that we are going to have to to unpick but also address together if we're going to solve these problems. And with that, I am not. I think what I will do is to actually hand off to Julia Panfill to talk just a little bit more about the report while we are waiting for Mayor Corey Woods to join us the mayor of Tempe who he was deeply involved in our deep data dive in this particular department, Mayor Woods, maybe just joining us. Yes. Thank you, Mayor Woods. Hi, good morning. That was just in time delivery. I was tap dancing. But anyway, we are I'm delighted. I just said Mayor Corey Woods is the mayor of Tempe and Tempe worked with us on what the deep dive and indeed as it really is at the heart of the number of these issues so Mayor Woods I'm delighted to hand off to you. Thank you so much know really appreciate it and I am very sorry for taking so long you know the call I was a it's funny I still despite being mayor of the great city of Tempe I'm still working into the full time job at Arizona State University. And so I was actually in a meeting that ran a little bit over so my apologies for being a little bit late this morning so but just glad to be here with all of you it's exciting. And once again I wanted to say thank you very much to for the presentation we were able to receive at our previous council meeting. I know that many of you know that in August the city council received a portion of this report and our work study presentation it was very well received from my both myself council and our entire style. And I also had several people who also emailed me who watched the meeting that day, who talked about how helpful the information was that they received. I just wanted to say thank you again for some of the advanced work you've done on this and for allowing me to join you today. I'll try to be pretty quick since I know you've got a full agenda today but I just wanted to say that you know I know Maricopa County was also part of the study that sort of forged this partnership between the ASU knowledge exchange for resilience and with the council received through your presentation and through some of the conversations we've had before and since a much better macro level understanding of housing insecurity, housing affordability, housing loss as well as evictions. You know as mayor of the city of Tempe and earlier during my service as a council member I happened to serve between 2008 and 2016. I had a very keen interest on trying to keep my pulse on affordable housing as well as what possible solutions could look like. Because as we all know that evictions are kind of a symptom of a bigger situation and a bigger issue. One of the things we really have to get to is the instability when it comes to people's finances, the lack of high quality affordable housing in Tempe and in a lot of our surrounding region. And so we really want to get to the root causes of these issues, which I know you want to as well. Now we all know that you know the governor's eviction moratorium has been extended to October 31. But as I sort of mentioned before this is clearly not a long term solution towards what is a very challenging problem. With this whole report that New America did was presented to our city council. We really did discuss the importance of identifying the root causes to evictions and working towards solutions that will increase the supply of both affordable and workforce housing. And that's something that everyone in this call knows many times, you know, people, you know, use those terms affordable and workforce sort of interchangeably, but they obviously are different and you know, and different, you know, meetings of sort of area median income so I mean I'm really happy to see that you make that distinction as well as I do. So, and I know that with the help of both our universities as well as our nonprofit community that are really doing the work of the ground. It will help to provide policymakers and arm them with the data they need to make real solutions in the lives of people, not only in Tempe but throughout the entire state of Arizona. So once again, you know I really wanted to thank you again for everything that you're doing. And I'm just hoping that everyone finds this work just as beneficial and rewarding as I do. Because I know that the work that you do is difficult, the data you collect, you know, is painstaking and takes a lot of time but honestly, I'm really happy that you're doing it. You're providing a lot of great information and a lot of great background and context to policymakers such as myself. So just wanted to say how much I appreciated you. And I'm happy to, you know, take any questions or stop right here in case you you've got me before I let you get back to your agenda. Thank you very much, Mayor Woods. It's so wonderful to have you with us today. And thank you for those kind words. So with that, I will quickly run through the presentation of some of our findings. And then we will turn it over to a great panel to discuss exactly as Mayor Woods had mentioned some of the underlying causes and triggers of housing instability and what can be done to alleviate it. So I'm so glad to be with all of you today. I'm the director of the Future of Property Rights program at New America, and I'm thrilled to share with you the results of this year long study to understand housing loss across the United States and tell the stories of communities impacted by that loss. Next slide please. So we started this research more than a year ago and we observed then that there were many ways in which Americans lose their homes. There was this very robust conversation around evictions driven by the groundbreaking research of the eviction lab. There had been a robust foreclosure conversation a decade ago, but it had mostly faded away. There had been a constant conversation around tax foreclosure driven by research in Detroit by Love Land and others. The news had been filled that summer with reports about Eris property and how black families who owned their land in this way were being dispossessed. But the gap that we saw in the conversations was that they were happening in silos and it was hard to understand holistically what housing loss looked like when you put all those things together. And which counties and states were most impacted, which demographics were most impacted. So we decided to try to weave together two of the most common triggers of housing loss in the US, evictions and mortgage foreclosures and look at them holistically as a single measure. And of course midway through our research, the world changed under our feet with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the predicted tsunami of evictions and foreclosures. And the research took on a new importance. We saw that the same areas tended to be impacted by housing loss over and over again. So by examining where housing loss had been most severe traditionally, we realized that we could start to predict where COVID related housing loss would be most acute. Next slide please. So we conducted our research on two levels. At the national level, we worked with the data science firm DataKind to examine county level housing loss. And then in three US counties, which you see on the map here, we went deeper down to the census track to see which neighborhoods had the worst problems and to talk to dozens of key informants to understand the context and the drivers of displacement. And we were so fortunate to have strong partnerships in place in each of these locations. As Ann Marie mentioned, without those partnerships, this research could have never been possible. So in Indianapolis, this work wouldn't have been possible without Molly Martin, the head of New America Indianapolis and also Abby Chambers from IUPUI. In the Phoenix metro area, it wouldn't have been possible without Patricia Solis and Laura Phillips from the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Center at ASU. And in Winston-Salem, we couldn't have done it without Scott Shane from the Wake Forest School of Law, Sherri Ann Clark from Wake Forest Anthropology Department and Craig Richardson from Winston-Salem State University. Next slide please. So I'll just spend a second on this before moving on to the fun stuff, which is our findings. We used a mix of quantitative analysis, geospatial analysis and data visualization and paired that with qualitative analysis via key informant interviews and desk research to complete the study. And I'll just draw your attention to the formula in the teal box. It's a new measure that we developed called a national housing loss rate, which combines evictions by percentage of renter households and foreclosures as a percentage of homeowners with a mortgage. And that measure allows us to see holistically how hard hit a given county or a given neighborhood really is by housing loss. Next slide please. And one more. One of our major findings was actually about data availability. Only two-thirds of counties had accessible top line eviction and foreclosure figures. And I don't mean publicly accessible because we had to pay for our foreclosure data. I mean accessible period. So what does that mean? That means that a third of a country is a complete black box when it comes to housing loss. And you can see on the color coded map where some of those gaps are. And that's pretty unconscionable given the crisis that we're in right now. And if you remember back to the original idea of mapping errors property and tax foreclosures and so forth, we pretty quickly had to abandon that because nothing even approximating a national data set exists. So although we were able to estimate based on evictions and mortgage foreclosures are general number of people who are losing their homes. In reality we know very very little about this topic and it comes down to bad data. Next slide please. So what do we know from the data set we have? We were able to rank 2,200 counties on their severity of housing loss and convert that into state rankings. We found that about 2% of Americans are losing their homes every year. And that Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina had the worst housing loss combining both evictions and foreclosures. And those are some of the same areas that have been hard hit by COVID this summer and also have high unemployment rates. So we anticipate that COVID related housing loss will be pretty bad there in the coming months. Looking at some of the county and county equivalents at the top of our housing loss index. Now we saw several unincorporated cities from southern Virginia pop up and that was mostly driven by high eviction rates. Next slide please. So this is just a screen grab of this national housing loss index that I mentioned and I really encourage everyone to go to the report site and play around with this table. It's very interactive. You can enter the county that you live in and see it's eviction rate, it's foreclosure rate and the combined housing loss rate. We have that for about two thirds of US counties and you can see some of those Virginia unincorporated cities up towards the top as well as some counties from Georgia and South Carolina. Next slide please. So mortgage foreclosures we found have been going down over the last five years but still there's a national mortgage foreclosure rate of about almost one and a half percent of homeowners with a mortgage and that's about double pre 2008 levels. So still very much a problem hundreds of thousands of people every year losing their homes in this way. Florida far and away experience the worst foreclosure crisis about 3.7% of Floridians with a mortgage are being foreclosed every year and Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and Tennessee also experienced high foreclosures. Next slide please. So the national eviction rate is about 2.6% more than 900,000 renter households are evicted from their homes each year. And we found that South Carolina had the highest eviction rate of any state with about 6.2%. So that's quite high. Other states with high eviction rates included Arizona, Virginia and Delaware. But as you'll see later in the presentation within states, we would see counties with double digit eviction rates and then within those counties, we would see neighborhoods where as many as a third of all renters were being evicted. Next slide. So my final slide before handing over to my colleague Tim who's the lead author on this report. We found something interesting in our deep dive data and it prompted us to look deeper. We collaborated with eviction lab to map 330,000 evictions across 17 states. And we found that evictions peak in the summer. There's about a 30% swing between the eviction low point which happens in March and the high point that happens around July and August. And we don't know exactly why that happens. Although we have a few guesses. One is the high cost of utilities in the summer. Another is that kids are out of school and the cost of summer care is too much for many parents. And finally, more people move during the summer. So landlords are more comfortable evicting because they know that they can fill the vacancy. Handing it over to you, Tim. Thank you, Yulia. Next slide, please. So as Yulia mentioned, we not only conducted national level analysis at the county level from the years 2014 to 2016. We were able to conduct in depth research in three case study locations for the years 2014 to 2018. These locations included Marion County, Indiana with Indianapolis, Forsyth County, North Carolina with Winston Salem and Maricopa County, Arizona with Phoenix Tempe and Mesa. And at the census tract level, we were able to map evictions, mortgage foreclosures, and then the combined housing loss rate as well. Next slide, please. So to provide a general overview of our findings, you will see the three maps at the top of the screen display housing loss rate at the census tract level in the three counties. In Marion County, we found a housing loss rate of 4.9%, meaning that approximately five households out of 100 will lose their homes every year. When it comes to top line figures in Marion County, around 17,000 households lost their homes in each year during our study period. In Maricopa County, the housing loss rate was about half percentage point lower at 4.5%, and approximately 47,000 households lose their homes each year. Now that is quite a striking number, almost 50,000 households. I will just note that Maricopa County is the fourth most populous county in the United States. So just something to keep in mind when looking at that. And finally, in Forsyth County, we found the lowest housing loss rate among our case studies at 2.6% between 2014 and 2018, meaning roughly 3,700 households lose their homes each year. Finally, finally on this slide, I'd just like to point out the eviction rates from all three counties. You'll see that the eviction rates themselves are higher than the aggregated housing loss rate. And that results in evictions having about three-fourths or comprising about three-fourths or more of all housing loss across all three counties. Next slide, please. So in our deep dive locations, we not only wanted to understand where housing loss was occurring, but what the drivers of displacement were. And I can say based on research that our partners conducted in all three locations that across the board, a combination of low wages and the lack of quality affordable housing is driving displacements in all three counties. I'd also like to point out a few unique factors in each county that are driving displacements. In Marion County, what we heard anecdotally and in a number of our he and former interviews was that substandard rental housing leaves the tenants illegally withholding their rents in order to force landlords into making repairs. But that is grounds for eviction in Marion County and Indiana at large. In Marion County, we see that, you know, external actors such as out of town investors, snowbirds or seasonal residents and the short-term rental market is taking housing out of the homeownership and rental sphere, leading to an increase in prices and poverty for people to afford their homes. And finally in Forsyth County, we've seen long established patterns of racial discrimination policy. Historically, that's been redlining and sort of those ongoing issues lead to disparities and homeownership household wealth among races and then an inability of communities of color to afford their homes. Next slide, please. So just alluded to, we also wanted to know who is most acutely affected by housing loss in each of these deep dive locations. So perhaps unsurprisingly across the board, it's black and Latinx households that are most impacted. And what we found through regression analysis of American community survey variables is that census tracts in each of the three deep dive locations with higher percentages of black households and higher percentages of Latinx households experience higher rates of housing loss. Another variable that I'd like to point out that was associated with housing loss in each of these locations was census tracts with a high percentage of households without health insurance exhibited stronger relationships to housing loss and especially evictions, which gives adage to something we heard anecdotally quite a bit that households are often a medical emergency away from being unable to pay their rent. Next slide, please. And finally, we wanted to know what the consequences of displacement were. And so across the board homelessness, perhaps, you know, unsurprisingly was a major consequence of displacements that can either be households doubling up with friends or families. Unfortunately, living in the cars are living in the streets around shelter or in the shelter neighborhood neglects and blights were also a major consequence of displacements, not only a decrease in property values resulting from foreclosure or eviction but also a proliferation of substandard rental units. When it comes to evictions in particular and eviction filing on a tenant's record often means that landlords will not rent to them and that means that they are pushed to less desirable neighborhoods with poor access to public transportation, good schools and good jobs. And then finally, I just want to note for children, as mentioned by Anne Marie, displacement often leads to educational disruption. They either have to switch schools or they have to adapt under less than optimal circumstances when trying to complete their schoolwork. Next slide, please. And finally, I just like to quickly touch upon some of the policy recommendations that are included towards the end of our report. The first is improving housing loss data. We need to know much better at scale, who is experiencing evictions, mortgage foreclosures and tax foreclosures. We also need to proactively prevent housing loss. Often individuals who lose their homes, their livelihoods spiral out of control, their credits wrecked, they have to move to a less desirable neighborhood, they lose their jobs, their saving account is drained. Decision makers need to be more proactive in preventing housing loss. At the same time, we believe that there needs to be an expansion of affordable housing options, either through established policies such as the creation of a housing trust fund, or further expansion of HUD's housing voucher program, also known as Section 8. And also through some more innovative policy implementations such as tax credits and establishment of community land trusts. And finally, there needs to be greater parity between landlords and tenants. That means, you know, write the council for tenants in small claims court or eviction court. We need greater legal support for undocumented residents who in many places are most at risk of eviction and there needs to be a passage of just caused eviction laws which can give tenants greater confidence and power when speaking up if landlords are negligent or predatory. Next slide please. And that's our presentation. Yulia, I'll hand it back over to you. If you have anything to add. If not, Malcolm, the floor is yours. Thank you, Tim. And thank you, Yulia, for such a really valuable overview for what is such an important report. And I encourage people, if they haven't had a chance to actually look the report to really dive in because there's some really phenomenally important information within it. I'm honored to be able to moderate a panel today with some, what I would call true experts to discuss the report but also to zoom out a little bit and talk a little bit more broadly about issues related to housing policy and displacement and how they impact of course so many other factors in people's lives. My name is Malcolm Glenn and I'm a fellow for the future of property rights program at New America and I'm also the director of public affairs at a company called better.com which is the fastest growing homeownership startup in the country. A reminder to everyone, please, please, please submit your questions in the Q&A box. And hopefully you'll have some really exciting questions that are spurred based on the discussion that we're about to have. And we'll get to as many of them as we can in the last 15 or so minutes of the panel. Tony today are three fantastic experts. I'll give each of them a chance to say who they are and and introduce themselves properly but I'll just run you through the three of them. And then we'll let them talk about the work that they're doing. First we have Emily Benford. Emily is a visiting professor of law at Wake Forest University School of Law and also the chair of the American Bar Association's COVID-19 Task Force Committee on eviction. We also have Tony Pickett. Tony is the CEO of Grounded Solutions Network. And last but not least we have Gabrielle Rene and Gabrielle is a community organizer for City Life Vita Urbana. I'm so so excited to hear what each of them have to say so to start off let's just go down the line. Let's have Emily and then Tony and then Gabrielle briefly introduce themselves. So a little bit more about their organizations and affiliations and some of the work they've been focused on in the past couple of months. Thank you so much Malcolm. This is Emily Benford and like Malcolm said I'm a law professor at Wake Forest School of Law and my area of focus and research is the intersection between housing and health justice and especially laws and policies that help to overcome silos like medical legal partnership to address these issues. During the pandemic I've been collecting and tracking and researching the various eviction moratoriums that have been introduced across the country at the state city and county levels and now looking at how the CDC moratorium is being interpreted in all the states as well. And so this has given us a window into what happens when you freeze eviction across the country. This this unintended social experiment can also give us insight into best practices and policies. And so with that created the housing policy scorecard with the eviction lab at Princeton University and I'm also following their tracking of eviction filings as these moratoriums lift so I'll discuss that a little bit more today. Tony the floor is yours. Thanks Malcolm. I'm Tony Pickett. I'm the CEO of Grounded Solutions Network. Our national nonprofit network has over 200 members across the United States. Our mission is to cultivate communities that are both equitable and inclusive and our major focus in advancing that mission is the provision of housing with what we call lasting affordability going beyond the normal term of affordability if possible going to perpetuity. So innovative models like community land trust limited equity co-ops are amongst our membership as well as including inclusive housing policies. So we have a number of municipal agencies that are members of our network who are actively creating units with inclusionary zoning programs and other inclusive housing policies. So one thing I want to inject early into this conversation is the pre COVID data point that a little over 18 million households were paying more than 50% of their income for housing and so a number of the findings of this report. I believe stem directly from that housing affordability crisis that was already in place before COVID even took effect. But also, and it was touched on by both Tim and Anne Marie and their comments and I so appreciated the real racial disparities in the process to housing of all types that has been a long standing issue in this nation. It is a contradiction to our values as Anne Marie said very eloquently earlier. And so I also focus on the racial wealth gap. That the average white families household income is 10 times the average black families. So when we start talking about COVID and we start talking about eviction and foreclosure people of color communities of color all over this nation are less able to withstand any sort of shock to the economy health issues, even access to jobs is driven, I think by that wealth disparity so I just want to put all of that on the on the table as we're having this conversation. Thank you, Tony. Those are such important points that we'll absolutely get to today. Finally, Gabrielle Gabrielle, I think your own mute. Hi everyone again, my name is Gabrielle I'm a community organizer with city life Vida Urbana city life is in Boston. We are grasped with community organization. Education is very simple. We are committed to fighting for racial, social economic justice and gender equality by work by building working class power. We promote individual empowerment, develop community leaders and build collective power to effect systemic change in transform society city life been around since 1973. What we do every day is working with families who are being evicted was facing with eviction and foreclosure prior to COVID-19 we have a weekly meeting that we do in both English and Spanish twice a week and we would see perhaps 100 families in a month coming in asking for help but since 2019 we set up a hotline and that hotline has received over 2000 calls from families who are afraid, afraid that they're going to be displaced afraid that they're going to be evicted because of COVID-19. Many of them have lost jobs have had reduced income, reduced hours at work. Many of them have been impacted directly by COVID-19 and they're being pushed out of their homes because they've got sick or because the landlord feels like you know if you're not able to pay you get to go. But fortunately for us in Massachusetts we did have one of the strongest moratorium, which is scheduled to end. It was extended from August last month and now it's scheduled to end on October 17. And because we know we are expecting a tsunami of foreclosure, a tsunami of eviction after the moratorium ends, we are working on a strong legislation that's in the state house right now. It's the House Bill H4878 and Senate Bill 2831 and that bill is going to make a difference, a huge difference in the lives of the people who are concerned, who are petrified right now about what's going to happen once the moratorium ends. For us here in Massachusetts and also we've heard from the attorney Emily Benford that we have an extension that the CDC came out with saying that moratorium is going to be in effect nationally for as of December 31. But still that moratorium is not as, it's not going to be as impactful as the one, the bill that we're working on in Massachusetts. So if you are in Massachusetts and you'd like to learn more about this moratorium and legislation actually and would like to be part of it and make an impactful help. That bill passed, definitely, you need to go to our housingguarantee.org, housingguarantee.org is a website that will show how to have more information about it. We are concerned because our members, the people that we work with every day are not able to sleep at night because they are petrified about what's to come after this is over. So we need to do something. You know, it's taking decades of bad policies to bring people where they are today, and we need to have strong policies that can get them out of it, can get all of us out of it. We all are being impacted some way or another. So yeah, thank you. Thank you all for those introductions and I think you already started to hit on a number of points that speak to how important this issue is both the historical remnants, the fact that this predates COVID and of course all of the really personal right grow ways in which people's lives are negatively impacted as a result of potential eviction or foreclosure. As we dive into questions and again I encourage folks to submit questions on the Q&A in the Zoom. Emily, I want to start with you. And of course, a lot of this conversation and so much emphasis in the field has been on the last few months and what potential evictions are going to look like as a result of COVID. But as Julia pointed out in her presentation, five million Americans were losing their homes each year before COVID. Tony mentioned 18 million who were spending more than 50% of their incomes on housing. And we all know that this is not going to end at whatever point COVID ends. A lot of the policies and recommendations are focused on physically keeping people in their homes during the pandemic. And so my question for you and would encourage others to chime in as well is, are these policies working? What is it going to look like when some of these moratoria expire? Gabrielle mentioned the October 17th deadline in Massachusetts and how can we actively and proactively develop policies that will have lasting change? That's a great question. So I think that we set ourselves up to fail in part because of what Tony mentioned that there were over 47.5% of all renter households were already cost burdened entering the pandemic. And renters who live in unaffordable housing are much more likely to have poor health than those who are paying less for their housing. So they're struggling to afford health care. They're hit much harder by the health consequences of the pandemic and job loss and other factors. And so we, there was no way that we could succeed in light of how long we had let the attention lapse to this issue. I think the report itself, the study really demonstrates that this is, there is no question. We have a significant housing crisis in the United States and failure to respond to it set us up to extend the length of the pandemic to have difficulty controlling it as people faced eviction and to withstand the economic downturn, especially among people of color and the communities that were already stretched threadbare because of the lack of social safety net. So in response to that, well about 40, exactly 47 states, I'm sorry, 43 states in the District of Columbia instituted a patchwork of policies that created moratoriums at the state level. Those moratoriums varied in duration, they varied in the stage of eviction that they stopped, and in their level of protectiveness. They were also limited to certain populations. So we had major gaps in the response to begin with there was no coordinated nationwide response to stop eviction, which could have helped us keep people housed prevent the spread of COVID-19, especially across state lines and in communities. And among people who were hardest hit by the pandemic and suffered that job loss over 50 million renters live in households that suffered COVID-19 job or range loss. So you can imagine how widespread this is this this meant that 30 to 40 million people across the country are at risk of eviction when moratoriums lift. So what was the effect of these policies. They worked. They actually worked the moratoriums that were put in place, no matter what the intervention had a chilling effect on eviction filings that the stronger moratoriums stopped the majority of evictions. And the weaker ones that only stopped hearings that were court initiated had a lesser effect but still a chilling effect on filings. The other thing we know is that the moment that they're lifted based on the eviction labs eviction tracker system filings resume and have even surpassed traditional historic levels in some cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, Ohio. And in those cities tracking with what we already know about the impact of housing loss and housing instability and especially as this report demonstrates displacement on communities of color. The filings that are taking place are more than eight times happening in communities of color than they are in white communities. So right now the people who are hardest hit by both job loss eviction risk and filings are in those communities and so we have this duty this obligation I think to finally take a look at the underpinnings of this problem and to address those while we have this break in evictions right now under the CDC moratorium. It's important to note though that the moratorium like the CDC moratorium like the state moratoriums is also limited. It's only for non payment it's only if a tenant signs a declaration. And there are some exceptions to it so it's important for tenants to know their rights in this area and to seek legal assistance to to ensure that they are able to take advantage of it. I'll stop there to make sure I answered your question to see if there's another track to go on. So that was fantastic and I just want to make sure that Tony or Gabrielle do you have anything to add to that specific one I have a bunch more to chat with you to about what I wanted to make sure that I gave you an opportunity to respond to that one as well. No I think Emily covered it well. I just wanted to say that the people are impacted at both renters and homeowners and that the CDC protection is not going to protect homeowners and we know that for closure. It's going to be another issue that we're going to have to deal with again. The same way that we dealt with it in 2008 so it's definitely something that that's why in Massachusetts the build that we have the housing stability bill that we have will be more comprehensive and be able to protect renters homeowners as well as small organizations of small landlords who have 15 or less units, they'll be able to be protected by our new legislation so definitely that's why we are pushing that in Massachusetts because the CDC is not going to suffice. Malcolm the moratoriums this is such a good thing to close this out the moratoriums are only effective in pushing the issue down the down the timeline. So they lift the risk of eviction for this moment, but like Gabriel said Gabriel said if we don't if we don't couple that with significant rental assistance to cover the background owed. In addition to the gap and affordability going forward, we have not solved the crisis to any extent we've only pushed it down the road. However, it's for it's giving critical relief to families right now that we don't want to lift those moratoriums because of the spike in illegal self help evictions that skirt the judicial process and other issues that could come up for tenants, but it is not coupled with rental assistance. And I think in terms of other policies you asked you know what what can we do to create lasting change. I think we truly need an examination of the policies that are in place and their impact on people of color is racial analysis that often doesn't happen. This is in this is for forms. This is for laws that are neutral for those that obviously have a disparate impact, and even the lack of interventions that that is a decision to and that had that should have an equity analysis as well. And there's many laws that are prime example of this that I think are interwoven in the outcome of this report. I'm all speaking to this recognition that we are not sufficiently comprehensive in what we're doing both at the state level and at the national level and I actually even want to zoom that out a little bit further. And, and Gabrielle, I want to start with you and then would love to broaden it to the rest of the panel but you know your organization is one that looks at racial social justice gender equality as you mentioned across issues including housing but not limited and so if you wouldn't mind I'd love for you to talk a bit about the downstream consequences of housing laws. Okay, we get to the point where the moratoria don't work. Someone does lose their home. How can policies be crafted not just to address that impact but then to provide families with additional support, their children with support, and more broadly, vulnerable groups with the support that they need. Yeah, definitely. City life. I mean, every day that's the work that we do and we've seen like even right now with the motorium so many families were not aware that there was a motorium because they were too busy working or not in and not organized with a group like city life or other organizations that are available to help support them. Many of them have been evicted during this crisis. And we've had calls from families who are living in their cars, families who are staying with families, you know, with friends on other people's couches. And that is going to affect you not only present, not only when you are dealing with the situation but long term we talked about the fact that children have had to, well with the crisis now many kids have not been able to go to school but with families that we know, families that I've talked to who have lost their homes since the crisis, the children don't know where they're going to go to school next, this school season coming up. And it's really detrimental because it has lasted long term. We say that city life like housing justice is a racial justice situation as well as medical justice situation because many of the families like we've been saying who have been impacted by foreclosure or eviction have had to have suffered in terms of like the medical, medical suffering. So that's why we work with several hospitals in Boston, I know Children's Hospital, that Israel Hospital, they've been working with us because they're seeing patients come into the ER, they're seeing families, children come into Children's Hospital and, and when they dig deeper at probing them asking questions, they realize that it's just a byproduct of the fact that they've had to endure housing insecurity. So it's impacting so many aspects of our lives and in our families lives. So that's why it's so important that the very COVID housing is a human right issue. And we say that all the time at city life because of the fact that without safe, affordable, and, and yeah, without safe and affordable housing impacts every aspect of your life, mental, spiritual and emotional and physical as well. So definitely we see how it trickles over to so many different aspects of our lives. So that's why we at city life and organization, our partners fight so hard to keep families in their homes. The very first thing we tell someone when they come with a no fault eviction or notice to quit, we tell them, you shall not be moved. We actually have a flyer that we give everyone and say, you shall not be moved because we know the second that you move out of that home. It's going to be downhill until you find safe and secure and affordable housing and so many families that have witnessed personally have had to go from shelters to shelters until they can find that new place. And that's why we fight so that they can stay wherever they at before they get evicted, because that eviction not only affects your credit and could cause you not to be able to get a job, or even the next apartment, but also just a physical and the mental and like I said, the physical and the mental and all the different ways that it impacts you negatively, we want to prevent that 100%. So, yeah, we shall not be moved is our thing. We say it over and over again, and let folks know that they have the right to fight back when they're facing unjust eviction when they're facing illegal eviction and when they're facing massive eviction displacement and gentrification in a community, especially in Boston here, Greater Boston area, we have Black and Brown communities who are experiencing all this gentrification with displacement. We have actors, huge real estate corporations who are coming from out of state, coming in, buying buildings, and mass evicting families by raising rents that they cannot afford and also by intimidating them out of the community that they've worked so hard to build. So, yeah, definitely so many ways that some an eviction can impact a family. Thank you. Well, thank you for that. And I think Tony, if you have something to add here, we'd love to hear from you. Yeah, I do. I just want to say, last year, we weren't thinking about this current context, but we did recognize the same racial disparities that we've been talking about and and this affordable housing crisis and we launched for the first time. In the cohort initiative, we selected three cities to focus on over the next, at that time, 18 months to really develop an anti displacement strategy and a policy agenda for those local places. So in addition to what you mentioned earlier about state and federal policy, I think there's also room for local policy to be shifted and changed to be more effective in preventing displacement. One of the things that we've landed on is also using a racial equity lens to make those policy decisions and we've applied it to all of our work across the organization and the way it manifests in this particular three city cohort, which coincidentally, Winston Salem and Indianapolis are part of that cohort, along with San Antonio. And so we also intentionally are including local resident leaders along with municipal staff and other stakeholders to explore, educate them on what the choices and options might be for policies to prevent displacement and ultimately to drive the decision making that leads to the policy change that's necessary to be effective. That really focuses on three things, preserving, producing and protecting housing affordability for the long term. On the preservation side, something that we're seeing more and more attention being devoted to is something called the tenant opportunity to purchase, giving local renters the ability if the landlord decides they want to sell their property to have a first right to make an offer to purchase that property. What that usually translates into is some type of partnership with a local affordable housing or nonprofit organization to, again, add capacity, bring the resources that are necessary and we've seen some successful examples of tenants being able to use that to prevent their own displacement. So giving them the power to change the outcome of the situation by intervening in the market forces, creating a housing preservation network organizers and the organizations that are doing housing preservation and production, working together coordinating their strategies and making sure that they all have common goals and outcomes in mind. Creating affordable housing trust funds to again create the resources that are necessary to pay small landlords to be able to prevent eviction from from taking place. There are also zoning reforms that are necessary when we talk about people don't always hold it in mind single family zoning is in and of itself exclusionary if you're not going to allow higher density development that can accommodate lower priced homes into a community, you're in essence excluding lower income folks from living in that community and that is another method of excluding families of color and has we've seen that play out over and over again. And again, the community land trust model that I mentioned earlier on starting a community land trust, having a resident driven nonprofit organization that would have the ability to purchase real estate, make it affordable and keep it affordable over the long term with, again, community investment participation in the governance and decision making of that organization. Those are just some of the options that we put on the table, but I'll also say there are some very unique things that can be brought to bear. One of the other things that we did last year we launched an entirely separate initiative to partner with municipal land banks and for folks that don't know what those are. Those are quasi governmental entities that actually take in distressed property and it doesn't have to be vacant property that can be a vacant building or blighted properties environmentally compromised property and transition that to a more productive use. Well, if we intentionally partner with land banks and say local land trust, then you have a pipeline of real estate going into the land trust that can produce affordable housing and allow people another opportunity to stay in their homes and neighborhoods. So what we really are trying to do is expand that model with this this three city cohort with Indianapolis Winston Salem and San Antonio was just the first pilot of it. We want to attract more resources, expand that model and use it to affect more communities nationwide. We're also working at the federal level to aggregate resources and create a priority for again this lasting affordability approach to change the dynamic of the system that we're in so I would say we're going to feel some short term pain and everything every other you're saying, you know, it tugs at the heartstrings to see people suffering like this and if we really want to demonstrate that we care about them we not only have to intervene in the crisis as we said earlier, but start thinking about a long term solution that reverses the trend that we've been on for the last several decades. I love that so much and I love that it sounds like you're speaking to ways in which we can empower families to sort of take a figurative and practical ownership over some of these challenging situations and I'd love to touch a little bit more on that a little bit later Emily, I want to just turn it over briefly to you because I know you've done some really interesting work around the social and health science findings on eviction outcomes and would love to just hear you maybe briefly speak to that work. Sure. So I think that the social and health research really supports everything that Tony and Gabriel are seeing on the ground that what what's happening in real people's lives is supported by the research in tenfold that eviction carries profound and lasting health consequences for individuals and children among adults eviction has been associated with depression, suicidal ideation, mortality, emergency department use increases, STDs, HIV related treatment conditions, drug use, exposure to violence, mental health outcomes that are negative. It goes on and on. One thing that I think is important to know that we don't often hear about a lot women and with children are the at the highest risk of eviction, especially in the pre pandemic era and they think that's tracking through. And for women evictions are linked to physical and sexual assault, drug use and harms related to that and mental illness and depression and even suicide and recurrent periods of housing and stability throughout their future. For children eviction is particularly traumatizing, not not even beyond the physical act of witnessing all of your belongings taken out of your home, your toys, your clothes, your books, everything that you knew to be home right before your eyes is traumatizing in and of itself, but the displacement and the couch surfing and the doubling up and the moves and the being displaced from your own community and your school and all those transfers also results in educational decline in emotional trauma. And it also affects their physical well being that children who have been evicted have higher rates of lead poisoning and food insecurity as well. So on top of the eviction and every all the harms that that causes, they're also going to have neurotoxins in their environment that create permanent brain damage and lasting harm as well. So eviction nothing good comes out of this it it sets people on a downward trajectory, and for many that can be permanent, and it negatively alters their lives. And that's something that we can prevent for with many of the interventions that Tony mentioned, and I'll just add to what Tony said that many of those interventions are preempted at the state level. And so addressing preemption laws is incredibly important to allowing and enabling local communities to address these issues. One other thing to point out that I thought was really fascinating about the report. The, the connection with lack of health insurance. There was a 2019 study that demonstrated that they studied early Medicaid expansion in California, and they found that early Medicaid expansion was associated with a reduction in eviction rates. Because we know that oftentimes when you're forced to choose between a critical health expense and your housing, that's an impossible decision and many people have to choose the health expense and then they lose their housing. So by expanding Medicaid, they found a 2.9% reduction in evictions per capita with that early expansion, which is really phenomenal so just really bolstering that finding and the need for that type of intervention as well. Ultimately, these are these are really Gordian not issues, but if people don't have housing stability, they can't flourish, they can't access opportunity. And if we are to hold that society is just by virtue of being able to participate in and exercise certain rights, justice is withheld for people who don't have that opportunity. Emily that's such a great point and you know one of the things that I always think about so many folks are rightly focused on these issues now because of the sort of oncoming crisis as a result of the pandemic but none of these issues are new. And the reason there's so much data that you just cited is because they've been going on for so long, and there are so many interconnected ways in which things like access to healthcare and education are impacted and impact people's housing stability or lack there of a question I'd love to hear from all of you about and maybe we'll just start with Tony. You know, these questions we've been dealing with for generations, if you just look at homeownership in the United States, it is the means the premier means of passing down wealth to future generations. And because of a whole host of historic intentional decisions around discrimination, the average black family has 12 times less wealth and the average white family we all know these steps. I'd love for you Tony to talk a little bit about how these very intentional historic planning and lending decisions have suppressed intergenerational homeownership for black families and by extension intergenerational wealth and what policymakers can do to ensure justice for these families who have historically been denied from the home ownership process. I would say it sort of starts with access to land ownership that that's kind of the foundational piece. I think that was approached in a racist manner from the beginning. Again, African Americans in this country weren't permitted to be property owners we were considered property for a long period of time, and even after emancipation came that we were still prevented from, in many cases, legally owning land, literally land is the basis of wealth in this country. And so we sort of have taken the view that community land ownership is one possible way to contribute to reversing the long term effects that you reference from that original exclusion from land ownership. And along with that communal land ownership goes home ownership so what when I talk about what we call shared equity models if there's an opportunity to have property that's owned in common by a community, but then have individual ownership of homes that are on that land. You give up some independence and some of the equity that goes with owning the land, but again you get stable housing it's a it's a balancing act. There's also a limited amount of wealth creation because you've given up ownership of the land so I just want to say, I think that's one way to contribute to closing the wealth gap is again, taking people who would otherwise not be able to achieve home ownership and looking at alternative ownership models like community land trust like limited equity co ops and resident owned communities, which are flourishing in some parts of the country, but applying them more broadly to address some of the profound disparity that we see in communities of color. The other aspect and we touched on earlier this idea of redlining when federal policy decided that they would not subsidize or guarantee mortgages in communities of color. That was a profound limitation on families of color being able to access mortgages. And so, you know, being able to say, Okay, we see the long term detrimental impacts of that decision. We also know that the federal government once again, it subsidized mortgages for white families to move into new suburban homes like at Levitown, but then placed racial covenants on those communities to exclude buyers of color from them. So, if you start thinking about what the investment was to buy those homes, and then you fast forward over several decades, the equity that accrues in that property now belongs to a white family, but black people. We do not have enough income to actually purchase those same homes today for the most part some of us do but but on average, we probably don't because of that again long term racial disparity in access to land access to mortgages. The same thing went on in the job market, as well as education higher education access access so we add all of that up. It's sort of cries out to me for some sort of reset and and some attention to intentionally benefiting families of color for the first time in the history of this nation because it has not really happened. Before we saw glimmerings coming out of the civil rights movement with the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act, but we know today, even that did not fully correct all of the injustice that that we've referenced earlier so one thing that that I'm advocating for along with our network is for federal policy to start to use this racial equity lens that we're using now and others and say, well, how do we take federal policy and make it intentionally benefit families of color across the board and housing is a foundational piece of it. I don't discount the importance of health and education. Those are important too but without stable housing, it's almost impossible to apply effectively health services and to deliver effective and lasting educational benefits, especially at the K through 12 level, which is so fundamental to deciding the life outcomes of adults of color in this country. Yeah, I think that those are some really valuable and important suggestions and potential contributions to solve some of those problems. Gabrielle, I just wanted to make sure that if you had something to add that you had a chance to chime in. Yes, in Massachusetts, we've been fighting for rent control to be able to protect families from exuberant amount of rents that are going up so fast, definitely not keeping up in pace with the increases that families are getting at work. So we've been fighting for that because in 1994 we had several of our cities here in Massachusetts had rent control and working class families were able to live in those cities. But now you have to make over $100,000 to rent an apartment in those communities so trying to get back a control over rent is definitely something that as an organization city life is working on to protect families because we have communities that used to be historically minority communities with working class families and they were able to afford rent and leave and live in those communities now they all being pushed out because Massachusetts is one of the is the second or the third most expensive state to live in and these families who've had roots, they've been living in a community for years and they have everything that they are comfortable with that they have families they have a community they have support system in a community and now they're being told that you cannot be here anymore because if you're not able to pay $3,000 for a one two bedroom apartment you cannot be here. So every single day as an organization somebody asked in the chat, what are we doing? We organize communities. We have buildings that we go in and organize and let them know that they have rights and we try we do our best to fight with them so that they can have the affordable rental and rents that they want and they can have the housing stability that every family deserve to have because again we said that the bad policies of the past and bad policies of today have kept families especially black and brown communities from accumulating wealth or from even owning homes and they've stayed for long time and now they're not even able to stay in the community that they were pushed to because of what's going on right now with the housing market that is out of control. That's why when control will put some control in this out of control housing market that we are experiencing right now. So, yeah, that's what I wanted to share. Thanks Gabrielle and the audience has been very enamored by this conversation and has submitted a number of questions so I want to transition over to getting to a couple of those. The first is from someone named Patricia and this is for any one of you. How do you expect that housing loss across the nation may affect participation in the election, when due to the pandemic. Many people are trying to vote by mail but if they lose their address. Is there a way to, or is there any move to delay the moratorium until after election day. There's increasing evidence that eviction and housing displacement results in voter suppression in great part because it's when you don't have that pillar of resiliency, it's almost impossible to tend to other areas of democratic participation. In addition, you have to register 30 days in advance of the election with your address. You don't need an address to vote, but you do have to be registered and so transferring that and complying with election laws can be really challenging if you're also struggling to keep your family safe, especially during a pandemic. So there are increasing studies on that in the 2014 election they studied Detroit and other Midwest cities, researchers did, and they determined that there was a significant decrease in participation in the election due to housing loss and displacement, and it affected communities of color at a higher rate than other communities because they were the ones most affected by that housing loss as well. The moratorium is scheduled, assuming it's not challenged and within an injunction granted through December 31. I'm thinking if how board in our election is the last thing on your mind, when you fight in or when you surf it from one couch to the next or when you deal with housing insecurity. These families are working totally jobs they don't even have time to stand in line or even have time to go through males to see whether or not they receive a ballot or they can register to vote online. I mean priority first thing first again housing as a human right until we have home secure housing security until families feel safe and secure in our home, everything else will be irrelevant. And, and I know for sure they are families that we've been working with right here in Boston, then I'm going to be voting they don't have the time or the energy or the, or the desire to be civically involved when they are being oppressed and they're being tortured by a system that's supposed to be helping them, serving them and the very system that's supposed to be serving them is oppressing them every single day. It's they're feeling it every day it's not it's not. It's not abstract, it's real for them so definitely that that will be a loss for us as a community as a nation. Emily I don't know if you wanted to chime in and add something on enterprises. I just wanted to back up and underscore we talked a lot about how the sorted history of discriminatory laws and policies and housing in the US has resulted in a lack of wealth accumulation lasting segregation disinvestment in communities. That has resulted in a lack of safety net that I think is part of why people of color were especially hard hit by the pandemic, over 70% of black and Hispanic adults entered the pandemic stating that they lacked the emergency funds to cover three months of rent. And so without that safety net when crisis strikes. The downward fall is immediate and precipitous and recovery can be nearly impossible and that's what we're seeing right now. And so the current track of response is not going to be enough, the piecemeal approach to housing affordability to stagnant wages to the lack of federal investment in how in affordable housing. We know that only one and four to one in six people who are eligible actually receive federally assisted housing. And so that that triple threat of rising rate of rising rents stagnant wages and lack of affordable housing has really resulted in this crisis. And you know when you look at it this way and in and bearing in mind the historical fact that fanny may and Freddie Mac these the enterprises were created by Congress to create a secondary mortgage market for the insured single and multifamily homes. It's central to establishing the present day discrimination and residential segregation that we see in housing and in home ownership. So when you look at it from that standpoint, at least as I see it, the, the enterprises, the federal government must and must correct the disparities in asset accumulation that resulted from that sort of history of laws and policies. And that the persistence of mortgage lending, I think is really apparent today as well. And there's an addition to the citing of affordable housing as well. And so this is something that the federal government has an obligation to correct a duty to correct under their enabling laws fanny and Freddie are charged with leading the market and facilitating the extension of credit to borrowers of color. And that's not happening today. And so really holding the federal government accountable for past actions and inaction. And then also for for what's happening today where we're seeing the the threats of the administration's unveiled efforts to terminate fair housing to dismantle civil rights to advance not in my backyard policies and in suburbs. All of these we have to be diligent in protecting against in order to prevent this golf of opportunity and pushing past offenses forward. I appreciate that Emily and and I was just going to say that one of the questions very much relates to what you just said about the requirement that the federal government get involved. The question is raised as you know what are your thoughts on the two tier housing policy system that is fundamental to the US I think we probably have a sense of what you all's thoughts are there but then the ensuing question is do you think a more aggressive federal intervention could play a role in mitigating housing problems. I suspect that the answer is yes but perhaps you all could expand a little bit more on what you think the federal government can and should do and perhaps we can start with Tony. Yeah I can say the framework is there. We've been partnering with the enterprises for the last couple of years and their duty to serve them. They consider our work in shared equity housing to be an underserved market. So they've been working on creating more access to mortgage financing. They actually created specific mortgage products for community land trust and other shared equity models but they're continuing to look at that fairly aggressively and I would say if they were given sort of more latitude and some very clear direction that we could get to a shorter time frame around the outcome of that. Right now we've been sort of testing those and piloting those where possible but again Emily you've touched on it. It's sort of a multi-pronged approach that's needed. Not only do we need the enterprises and the mortgage markets to be aligned but we also need the federal subsidies that are going directly for housing to be aligned. If we continue to create what I call term limited affordable housing we continue to find ourselves in this ever continuing cycle of investing a large sum of money to create affordable housing that then we allow to expire and convert to market and the market is never going to just be benevolent on its own and align the price with what incomes are. So finding a mechanism to force it to create at least the portion of affordability that are serving those most in need is necessary. It's done now through the low income housing tax credit program and others. I have no issue with the LITECH program other than it does not preserve the affordability long term. It allows it as I said earlier to expire. That's one of the biggest challenges that we see in most of the major high cost markets right now is what affordable housing there is is continually expiring and without additional public sector or philanthropic investment in keeping it affordable it won't remain so. Thanks for that Tony. We are short on time so I might end with one final question for each of the panelists. I'll ask you to be brief so that we can close on time but what I thought was a really interesting question. How might reparations support black homeownership? Again I say anything that contributes to closing that racial wealth gap I think could result in more black families becoming homeowners. I think the down payment, ongoing investment and maintenance in homes and other financial pressures are part of what's preventing unlocking black families as a major contributor to homeownership or a major segment of homeownership. So definitely improving the financial circumstances of black families would go a long way toward changing that dynamic. Gabrielle and Emily do you have any thoughts on reparations? Definitely like I said earlier decades of bad practices and bad policies have gotten us into this mess and it's going to take good policies and change. Anything that could help families undo the wrongs that have been done against minorities just 10 years ago during the mortgage crisis in Massachusetts, a majority of the families who lost their homes and who became homeless and unfortunately became renters the after have been families of colors. We definitely need to do something. Preparation is a start that would help us build the equity and build the wealth, reduce, shorten the wealth gap and definitely help families build equity so that in situations such as this one with a COVID-19 crisis similar anything similar to COVID-19 families will have the reserve like the professor talked about they will have the reserve to bounce back. They'll have the reserve that could help them recover or sustain during a crisis. Many Americans are not struggling they're not losing sleep over this crisis. But the majority of those who are losing sleep or struggling who are facing eviction and foreclosure right now are minorities, black and brown families, people of color. So definitely anything that can be done to pay back the warms that have been done for decades for hundreds of years would be helpful. Again in Massachusetts we're working on this legislation to help families have 12 months of peace of mind after the moratorium is lifted after the state of emergency is has ended, we need to have protection beyond that. And this new legislation that we that's in the state house right now age 4878 and Senate bill 2831. You can get more information about that from housingguarantee.org. Definitely that will be some way, a small way to help give some peace of mind to families right now, but definitely a long term goal will be reparation. Thank you so much, and I'll leave it there. One other thing I have to add I think those are excellent points. The evidence for reparations is in slavery in Jim Crow, and in racist housing policies among others. And I think if we don't, if we don't address these compounding issues, if we, if we don't address horrible housing today, if we don't prevent the eviction crisis today, we can add that to the case for reparations that the absence of laws the absence of interventions can is also can be a result of can lead to structural discrimination systemic discrimination, and is a racial injustice in and of itself so housing and racial justice are deeply intertwined in this way. That's a phenomenal point to end on so I hope everyone will join me in offering their virtual applause for Emily Tony and Gabriel thank you all so much for taking some time to speak to your expertise on on these issues and to speak to how they all relate to the report that we're so excited about today. Thank you for the report has just been dropped in the chat. Please check it out this place in America mapping housing loss across the United States. And with that, I will offer my thanks again and turn it over to Julia to close this out. Thank you so much Malcolm and thank you, Gabrielle Tony and Emily for your wonderful contributions. I will, I see that we're at time so I will end with just two quick last observations and send you on your way the first is really to underscore what Gabrielle said, which is that housing is a human right. And in fact, housing is article 25 of the unit of the universal declaration of human rights, the right to housing. And that's something that I think we forget a lot in this country. And that is something really uncanny that happened during our research, multiple interviewees independently in both Indianapolis and Phoenix brought up the specific example of losing their home, because of getting a flat tire. So think about how much it costs to change the tire on your car. And now think that that's what's standing between people having a roof over their head and not. And to me that really brought home the precarity of housing in this country and the inequities that we see in granting people this basic human right. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody for taking the time out of your busy weeks to participate. I hope that you enjoy the report. I hope that you reach out with any reactions or questions were only beginning this work. I wish you everybody a wonderful day and thank you for turning in