Used Matthew Desmond's Evicted as my initial book. I highly recommend it to anyone.
He wrote a companion essay a few months ago in the NYT as the moratoriums were ending.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/sunday/eviction-covid-pandemic-housing.html
But now, we finally have a chance to act boldly on housing. After years of congressional negligence, federal lawmakers are currently considering the Build Back Better Act, which would invest $327 billion in affordable housing over the next decade. That money would be used to expand rental assistance to millions of struggling families, upgrade public housing, finance the construction of rental homes, and more. This would be a long-overdue investment in housing the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.
As legislators debate what gets included in the final bill, cutting deals between moderates and progressives, I hope they remember that any comprehensive plan to alleviate poverty must include investments in affordable housing. When we lift incomes at the bottom — say, by expanding the Child Tax Credit, a laudable program in itself — without addressing the housing crisis, those gains are often recouped by landlords, not wholly by the families.
A study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in 2019 found that when states raised minimum wages, that initially made it easier for families to pay rent. But landlords quickly responded to the wage bumps by increasing rents, which diluted the effect of the policy. This is already happening today, but we prefer to discuss it using the bloodless language of inflation.
When the eviction moratorium was in place, millions of Americans could worry about something else for a change. For Ms. Higbee, it was her health. She was able to assemble a care team focused on her seizures. She found a lawyer to help her apply for disability. With the moratorium covering her family, Ms. Higbee was able to go to the hospital for a neurological assessment. “The moratorium saved us,” she said. “It really did.”
It's a serious crisis. The patchwork of state programs varies so much, it's difficult for people to understand what they face and the resources that are available to them. Caseworkers are completely overloaded and bureaucracy moves slowly.
I was reading a story where the rental assistance program in San Francisco was online only, and they were using Google Translate to make up the forms. So the "return" button on the website actually translated as, "Go back to your country," in Chinese.
That bit was a highlight of my reading.
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