The Impact of Renter Education on Risk of Eviction for Tenants with and without Rental Assistance

The intervention is a renter education workshop, which is a 3-hour, in-person workshop during which participants will receive detailed information about their rights and responsibilities as tenants. They will learn how to resolve conflicts with landlords, how to navigate the eviction process, and where to find community resources to support housing stability. The Renter Education program focuses primarily on
myths pertaining to renting. The workshop will be held at community centers and libraries in neighborhoods throughout Columbus where high numbers of emergency rental assistance applicants reside. Community Mediation Services, a local nonprofit that has been offering renter education workshops for over a decade, will host the workshops.

2024-01-20

2024-04-06

We are interested in measuring the extent to which renter education reduces evictions. We will use local court records to capture information on judicial evictions that take place within six-months of participants' enrollment in the study. We operationalize "eviction" as eviction filings, judgments, writs of restitution, and set-outs. We will use survey data to capture self-reported information on informal (non-judicial) evictions and other residential moves that occur within six months of study enrollment.

Because our participants are drawn from applicants from a rental assistance program, some of our participants will receive rental assistance during the study period and some will not receive rental assistance. Thus, we will also examine the secondary effect of receiving rental education with and without rental assistance. The final outcome will still be eviction, operationalized as previously described, but we will include receipt of rental assistance as a moderating variable.

The experimental research design draws from online applicants to the Franklin County rental assistance program known as PRC. When applicants finish their online application, they’ll see a screen inviting them to participate in the study. Applicants who affirmatively consent to participate will then be directed to complete an online survey that solicits information about participants’ housing history, housing quality, and knowledge of housing rights. The survey should take approximately 15 minutes to complete.

After completing the survey, participants will be randomly assigned to either a treatment or a control group; 80 percent of participants will be assigned to the treatment group and the rest to the control group. Treatment group participants will then be invited to participate in a renter education program to be held within one to four weeks. Control group participants will receive a list of local and online renter education
resources but will not be invited to participate in the renter education program.

The renter education workshop—the primary treatment—is a 3-hour, in-person workshop at which participants will receive detailed information about their rights and responsibilities as tenants. They will learn how to resolve conflicts with landlords, how to navigate the eviction process, and where to find community resources to support housing stability. The Renter Education program focuses primarily on
myths pertaining to renting.

All treatment and control group participants (excluding any who may have opted out of the study at the time of treatment) will receive an email and text invitation to participate in a second online survey six months after their initial PRC application. The second survey will request information about participants’ current living situation to determine whether any change in residence has occurred since the initial PRC application. This experimental research design allows for the evaluation of the main effect of receiving renter education and the
secondary effect of receiving renter education with and without rental assistance. An important element of this design is that study participation will be offered to all PRC applicants prior before applicants know whether their application for assistance has been approved or denied. Thus, participants will fall into the following four categories: no intervention, PRC Only, renter assistance only, and both PRC and rental assistance. Importantly, while the assignment to the renter education treatment is random, receipt of PRC is not random and is determined by the PRC program. Thus, while we can compare the outcomes of treatment group participants to control group participants and determine whether there appears to be is an added benefit of receiving rental assistance with PRC versus receiving renter education alone, the lack of randomization into the PRC program prevents us from identifying a causal effect of PRC on research outcomes.

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Participants will be randomized into treatment and control groups via the Qualtrics survey system upon completion of their first survey. Of participants who complete the survey, 75% will be randomized to the treatment group and 25% will be randomized to the control group.

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We estimate enrolling 1,267 up to a maximum of 2,000 individual PRC applicants in the study. The final number of enrollments will depend upon take-up rates at the various stages of the study.

Treatment - 900 individuals
Control - 300 individuals

Our power calculations are derived from the equation proposed by McConnell & Vera-Hernadez (2015) for determining sample size for a study with a binary outcome. For our power calculations, we assume that p = 28%, which represents the eviction rate of PRC participants who received assistance between April 2020 and August 2021. We assume an alpha of 0.05, a ratio of 3:1 for the treatment vs. control group, and an MDE of 0.13. This suggests that we would expect to detect an effect if the difference between the treatment and control groups were 13 percentage points, or a 15% eviction rate among the treatment group vs. a 28% eviction rate in the control group.