How Do Crises Impact Policy Debates? The shifting national landscape of discourse on rental housing in the USA

How do crises impact national policy debates? We map the discursive field around rental housing policy in the USA via online speech between 2015–2023 with a framework of six policy areas : (1) private rental, (2) subsidized rental, (3) state-owned, (4) pro-supply, (5) antidevelopment, and (6) fair housing. We measure activity on social media with 36 keywords to create a corpus of 12.7 million posts on the platform Twitter (now X), which proxies public discussion. We find that the crisis of COVID-19 expanded and changed the structure of discourse: from a smaller conversation pre-COVID-19 in which public and subsidized housing prevailed toward an explosion during the pandemic on eviction protections and rent controls, followed by a larger emphasis on discrimination. These differ from stated priorities of local elected officials. Our findings show that the crisis shifted policy debates toward greater government involvement and stronger tenant protections, suggesting that attention to state intervention intensifies during periods of crisis. We emphasize the growing significance of social media as data for understanding how ideas circulate about policy today, with repercussions for the public, researchers, and policymakers.