Lessons from California’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program: The Experience of Administrative Burden in Policy Implementation

We explore the impact of burden-reducing legislation intended to improve access to emergency rental assistance through California’s COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The law simultaneously made three changes to the program: it simplified paperwork, fully funded rent arrears, and created a means to send funds directly to the tenant. Using a pre-post modeling approach on administrative data, we find strong evidence that the law increased the capacity of the program to disseminate needed assistance, particularly to women, Hispanics, those living in less dense dwelling units, and those in less formal housing arrangements. However, our descriptive analysis finds little evidence that these changes affected tenant experience. We conclude that reducing compliance costs for administrators by clarifying and easing statutory requirements led to improved outcomes for program applicants. However, these improved outcomes were largely invisible to applicants, who continued to experience long wait times and limited communication from a program scrambling to meet a tremendous need. We contribute to the administrative burden literature by emphasizing the administrator’s experience of burden in an emergency setting, providing evidence of the effectiveness of direct rental assistance for single-family and low-density dwellings, and pointing to a gap in the literature about disaster response and recovery programs.