UCLA Economic Letter for September 2020

The UCLA Economic Letter is the monthly communication of the UCLA Anderson Forecast and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. The Letter, sponsored by the Ziman Center’s UCLA Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance and Urban Economics, provides new insights into the major economic and real estate concerns of the day in a quickly digestible format. It draws upon original research, policy analysis and forecasts produced by UCLA academics and Forecast economists to address the most pressing issues confronting us all. As the premier public university, the University of California serves society as a center of higher learning and strives to provide long-term societal benefits through the discovery and transmission of advanced knowledge. The UCLA Economic Letter series seeks to support those goals.

In this September 2020 letter, researchers from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, Karna Wong, Paul M. Ong, and Silvia R. Gonzalez, find that about 5 million – or 8% of American homeowners – were unable to pay their mortgage on time, April to July 2020. In addition, under the COVID-19 crisis, compared with non-Hispanic whites, Black and Hispanic (for Latinx) individuals had two to three times higher odds of experiencing housing hardships.

A link to the complete study can be found here >>> Systemic Racial Inequality and the COVID-19 Homeowner Crisis