How equitable is the distribution of Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF) funds to homeowners most in need of assistance?
- Economic Development
- Equity
- Housing
Project Overview
Summary
The U.S. Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget hosted a researcher interest meeting on February, 13, 2024. Click here for the slides from that meeting.
The Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF) is designed to prevent mortgage delinquencies and defaults, foreclosures, loss of utilities or home energy services, and displacement of homeowners experiencing financial hardship. HAF provides $9.961 billion for states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, Tribes or Tribal entities, and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to provide relief for the country’s most vulnerable homeowners. In the immediate term, a key research priority for the Homeowner Assistance Fund is understanding how its funds are flowing to homeowners most in need of assistance.
In comparison to previous programs to assist homeowners, such as those launched during the Great Recession, HAF is uniquely focused on equity and meeting the needs of low-income homeowners. Specifically, HAF recipients must use at least 60 percent of their HAF award funds for qualified expenses to assist homeowners with incomes at or below 100 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) or less than 100% of the median income for the U.S. Additionally, any amount not made available to homeowners that meet the income-targeting requirement must be prioritized for assistance to “socially disadvantaged individuals.” Taken together with program features that permit payments for a wide range of expenses (including utilities and homeowners association fees), allow for a variety of support for homeowners (legal services and housing counseling), and encourage culturally competent outreach strategies, this focus on assisting the most in need homeowners makes addressing barriers to equitable access a key consideration in the program’s implementation.
Deliverables
Meetings: Regular meetings with Treasury program and evaluation staff to discuss the research approach, the evaluation plan, initial findings, and reports.
Evaluation Plan: An evaluation plan that Treasury will review before researchers begin any analysis. This evaluation plan should outline the researchers approach to evaluating the relevant research question, including methodology.
Evaluation Report(s): An interim report for review by Treasury and a final public report that include the results of the evaluation assessing how the HAF program is serving low-income and socially disadvantaged homeowners. Reports should include short 3-4 page plain language summaries of results as well as documentation on methodology. For example, see this sample of a summary of findings and methodology from a previous research project.
Planned use of results
This research will help inform how the Homeowner Assistance Fund works with state governments that are receiving HAF award funds and whether additional guidance or support is needed to ensure that HAF participants are meeting their goal for helping homeowners most in need to stay in their homes. Depending on the results, Treasury could use this research as the basis to create additional promising practice documents or other tools that seek to increase the effectiveness of the HAF program. This research will also inform Treasury’s lessons learned from the American Rescue Plan programs as well as the federal government’s long-term policy development for future programs to assist homeowners in future economic crises.
Data
While Treasury is open to a variety of research designs, the following are some illustrative ideas of ways to conduct research in this area. In particular, potential evaluation designs focused on the equitable distribution of HAF funds to homeowners most in need of assistance could utilize of number of data sources. Using HAF reporting data on the demographic distribution of HAF funds can provide a high-level sense of the program’s equity impact. To identify potential evaluation designs, researchers could also use information on the differing features of each state’s HAF program by examining the state plans posted on Treasury’s website.
To dive more deeply into how the program is serving low-income and socially disadvantaged homeowners, researchers could partner with a state to use data on the distribution of HAF assistance across census tracts to perform a descriptive analysis of the characteristics of areas that had larger numbers of HAF beneficiaries, with a particular focus on examining Qualified Census Tracts. In addition, Treasury could help researchers work with states to confidentially access individual level beneficiary data via a secure data sharing agreement.
Additional potential data sources could include foreclosure data and credit reporting information which can be used to do more in depth examination of the equity impact of the program with the possibility to examine which aspects of the program were most successful for increasing assistance to underserved homeowners.
Some examples of potential data sources include:
Agency Learning Agenda Question(s)
Treasury Learning Agenda Question 1.3: To what extent are American Rescue Plan (ARP) programs being implemented equitably? What is the impact of ARP programs on households, businesses, and governments? More details are available in Treasury’s Economic Recovery Learning Agenda.
Contact and Project Updates
The project is in progress.
We plan to post results and deliverables when the project is complete. In the meantime, we welcome questions about the project.
Download and share the project summary
Project point of contact
Vanessa Megaw
Outreach Director
Department of the Treasury
OSPPI@treasury.gov
Project Team
Stephanie Moulton
Ohio State University
Laurie Goodman
Urban Institute
Members of the Project Team are listed for informational purposes; the U.S. Government does not endorse or recommend named organizations or entities.