How Pandemic-Era Emergency Rental Assistance Helped Families With Food Insufficiency

Estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that nearly one in five households with children—about 6.5 million households all told—experienced food insecurity in 2023, meaning they had limited access to nutritionally adequate foods due to an inability to afford them. Since rent competes for household resources with food, rent burden can strain food security for many households with low incomes. 

Households with low incomes experienced rent burden before the emergence of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s economic fallout further exacerbated their economic hardships. In response, Congress authorized more than $46 billion in federal emergency rental assistance (ERA), while state and local rental assistance programs provided additional funds to help families maintain their housing. These initiatives offered a unique opportunity to assess the impact of ERA on food insufficiency.

A research team led by Child Trends—in collaboration with MEF Associates, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins—conducted mixed methods research to understand how ERA might ameliorate food and housing hardships for renter households with children and low incomes. 

The study team analyzed nationally representative data from the Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, collected from July 2021 to May 2023. We investigated how receipt of ERA was associated with food and housing hardships, adjusting for a wide range of economic and demographic factors. In addition, we gathered qualitative information from focus groups with caregivers of children who received ERA in 2023. To recruit study participants for the qualitative portion, we partnered with CAP Tulsa, a whole-family early childhood education program in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  

Our research provides evidence that ERA not only helped families stay current on rent but also ensured their children had enough to eat. Parents, in turn, experienced relief from ERA—both economically and psychologically. Our findings are summarized in two research briefs—one focused on quantitative results and the other on qualitative findings.  

Our qualitative analysis finds that families who received ERA continued to struggle financially after their benefits expired, facing a housing market that remains challenging for renters with low incomes. Although ERA was designed to be a one-time, emergency response, evaluating federal and local ERA programs offers opportunities to inform existing and future rental assistance programs and learn about their potential impact on renter households with children and low incomes.  

Caregivers in our study shared that food, housing, and child care represented competing needs. Based on our research, though, rental assistance programs can offset some of families’ economic hardships. Caregivers also wanted help finding jobs that offer the wages, benefits, and educational opportunities necessary for longer-term economic self-sufficiency.  

There should be enough nutritious food to go around for households with children in the United States. While there are numerous strategies to address food insufficiency for households with children and low incomes, rental assistance programs can be a valuable part of these solutions.  

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Acknowledgement

This blog is based on joint work funded by two grant awards to Child Trends’ co-principal investigators (co-PIs), Gabriel Piña and Yiyu Chen, as well as co-PIs Kathryn Leifheit and Eliana Perrin from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research program [grant numbers 80767 and 119755].

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