In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, federal, state and local governments rolled out relief programs from 2020 through 2022 to offset the precarity that many suffered due to lost work, sickness, and insecurity in the United States (US). Emergency Rental Assistance Programs (ERAPs) were an essential piece of this agenda. The State of Illinois allocated over $1 billion over three rounds of ERAPs from 2020 to 2022. The state even loosened regulations over time to maximize access to funds for renters with antagonistic landlords or poorly documented lease agreements, making Illinois a best-case scenario for tenants.
Yet, based on our analysis of Census Bureau data, many of the most rent-burdened residents did not even complete applications for these programs. In Chicago, Black and Latine tenants were two-to-three-times more likely to be behind on rent than white renters, but 70 percent of Black renters and 80 percent of Latine renters in the city did not even apply in the first round of assistance. So, why did so many of the renters with the greatest need, who were the intended beneficiaries of ERAPs, struggle to participate?
Our new article in American Sociological Review details one set of explanations for these struggles. Based on 101 interviews conducted from 2020-2022 with local housing policy experts, community organization staff, and low-income renters in Chicago, we identified a key distinction between an applicant being eligible for formal public relief programs and being legible to the bureaucratic processes of applying for and receiving funds.
To become legible to bureaucratic systems, individual applicants must translate their complex lives and challenges into predetermined and standardized categories. Specifically, we found that low-income renters often engage in informal housing arrangements, like handshake agreements with landlords, in order to make ends meet.
These informal arrangements were often illegible to the application process for ERAPs even when the tenant was technically eligible. In fact, 20 percent of the 76 low-income renters who we interviewed shared that they did not think they had written lease documents. There were three specific mismatches between low-income tenants and the structure of relief programs that we documented.
The first type of mismatch we observed was the difficulty renters faced in assembling the required documentation to prove ERAP eligibility, like statements indicating the amount of rent owed. A housing policy expert gave a key example:
In the last round [funded by the CARES Act], the application required the landlord to submit a written lease, which, by definition, excludes tenants with oral leases or less formal arrangements. (4/13/21)
Later rounds of assistance adopted more lenient criteria: written leases and landlord participation were not always required. But these adjustments did not necessarily translate to easier procedures, according to the renters we interviewed. One renter explained how difficult it could be to apply for ERAPs for people who are unfamiliar with formal applications for government assistance:
There are a lot of different deadlines with a lot of documentation, again, when it comes to . . . housing assistance for rent, right?… Getting certain documents, and getting them in a short period of time, before the money ran out or before the application period quit. Then it was a barrier. (10/19/20)
For their part, staff at nonprofit community organizations did their best to help renters apply for assistance – and were sometimes funded by the state to do so. When we spoke with them, these staff members reported:
I cannot tell you how many calls a day our caseworker gets for, you know, simply navigating rental assistance applications… The platform is unfamiliar, you know, the questions that are being asked are unfamiliar. It can be very simple questions, but people just don’t know how to answer because they haven’t had this level of recourse offered to them. (10/4/21)
Although staff members were familiar with navigating application procedures, the sheer number of tenants who were struggling not only with paying rent but with completing ERAP applications was overwhelming for these organizations.
Second, ERAPs generally relied on the fact that tenants could not be legally evicted through court order while they were waiting on relief payments in Illinois. Many tenants, however, worried that their landlord would force them out extralegally if they were not able to pay their rent. A tenants’ rights activist told us:
Instead of the landlord wanting that balance paid off or wanting to take them to court to get the money, instead of that, they’re providing the option to just get out… The threat of eviction is still very relevant regardless of the moratoriums that we currently have in the state of Illinois and also nationally. (5/4/21)
When these tenants lost income or employment due public health precautions, they often prioritized making rent even at the expense of groceries or medications because ERAPs had not yet materialized.
One renter, for instance, told us that a local nonprofit gave her $100 of cash assistance for groceries that she put toward rent. The amount was minimal, but she attempted to placate her landlord: “They give it to you in cash, and I used it for rent because my husband is only working two days a week now” (8/13/20). Because these tenants technically were not behind on rent, they were not eligible for ERAP relief even if they might have desperately needed the help in 2020. ERAPs provided money to those who were behind on rent—not to those who went made painful sacrifices to pay rent.
Third and finally, undocumented immigrants residing in Chicago had unique concerns with accessing state resources through formal applications. Undocumented residents faced specific risks in being rendered legible to the state, which may explain why some avoided applying for ERAPs. For instance, the so-called “public charge” rule allows immigration officials to deny applications for permanent residency or visas if applicants received certain public benefits as undocumented residents.
In early 2020, for instance, this rule was expanded by the Trump administration to include Medicaid and food stamps programs. Although undocumented residents were eligible for ERAP funds if they were behind on rent, a representative of human services in Illinois explained the risks of applying:
So, the landlords themselves didn’t want to participate… [because] they don’t want to receive any money from the federal government and have to deal with it later. And then of course there’s lots and lots of landlords who just were unresponsive… The reality is, if you’re undocumented, and your landlord says “get the F out,” you get out. You don’t get a day notice, you don’t get 10 days notice, you don’t get a month’s notice, you’re out. And if you’re not out, they will call the police, who will call ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. They’ll threaten to call ICE, or they’ll just change the locks on you because what are you going to do? (10/14/21)
Due to the perceived risks of eviction or immigration enforcement, the advocates we interviewed often reported that undocumented residents would prefer to remain illegible to the state. These dynamics were not adequately accounted for in the design of ERAPs even though undocumented tenants were intended recipients in Illinois.
What is the impact of these mismatches between policy and reality? When low-income renters were unable to access ERAPs or were waiting on payouts, their economic precarity was exacerbated. After all, while it took months for these programs to be set up and for applications to be processed, rent continued to come due. The conditions of desperation and precarity that illegibility created were especially evident in our interviews with health care providers and staff at community clinics.
A care provider at one clinic explained how people were sometimes choosing to stop taking medications in the midst of a pandemic just to keep up with rent: “A $10, $15, $20 copay, a lot of people think it’s nothing. If you’re taking multiple medications and for some of our patients, $20 a month is a lot of money. It’s making them choose between rent [and] food” (5/17/20). Another doctor explained how he saw economic precarity as a social determinant of health given that many of his predominantly Latine patients’ only option was to continue working in-person throughout the pandemic: “Why do Hispanics get more COVID?… The truth is that they get COVID in the factories, and they cannot stop working because they cannot pay rent” (3/18/2021). In his view, renters in the community he served felt they had no option but to risk their health in unsafe work environments just to keep up with rent because they could not count on state support like ERAP funding.
Altogether, our work illustrates that legibility, the match between the specific conditions faced by people in need and the standardized design of relief programs, is a crucial dynamic for understanding working-class experiences of crisis. Namely, government programs intended to support vulnerable groups often require documentation, procedures, or accounting strategies that are uniquely onerous for people who have the greatest need for relief.
Our analysis of illegibility suggests a handful of possible steps to make relief programs more accessible. At the most basic level, illegibility occurs when people face widespread material hardship but cannot access relief programs because of the documentation required.
To truly serve the most vulnerable households in cities like Chicago, safety net programs need to compromise on bureaucratic concerns with documentation and fraud prevention. In the case of ERAPs, this might include organizing eligibility around a broad category (e.g., all renters, renters below an income threshold) rather than specific demonstrations of need. Minimizing involvement of landlords and the threat of law enforcement that comes with them would likely also improve outcomes for many tenants.
Finally, there is an argument to be made for decentralizing relief programs to local elected officials, like aldermen in Chicago, or non-profit organizations, which may have a better understanding of vulnerabilities at the neighborhood level but can still meet financial reporting standards.
Claire Laurier Decoteau is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois–Chicago.
AJ Golio is a doctoral candidate of Sociology in the City, Culture, and Community program at Tulane University.
Cal Lee Garrett is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University.
This article is based on Decoteau, C. L., Golio, A., & Garrett, C. L. (2025). The Risks of Renting on the Margins: Housing Informality and State Legibility in the COVID-19 Pandemic. American Sociological Review, 90(1), 88-113. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241307343
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