Faculty Spotlight: Vincent Reina

Vincent Reina is a Penn IUR Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning, Stuart Weitzman School of Design; and Faculty Director, Housing Initiative at Penn (HIP), an initiative based in PennPraxis that brings research, analysis, and partnerships to achieve more effective, equitable housing policy. His research focuses on urban economics, low-income housing policy, household mobility, neighborhood change, and community and economic development. He began his career at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a Community Planning and Development Representative and a Project Manager in its Division of Multifamily Housing, and then at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), where he underwrote financing for affordable housing developments across the country. Penn IUR conducted this interview as part of its semi-annual spotlight on Penn IUR Faculty Fellows.

The Penn Press/Penn IUR City in the 21st Century (C21) series published Perspectives on Fair Housing, which you co-edited with Provost Wendell Pritchett and Penn IUR Co-Director Susan Wachter this fall. What does the book have to say about the FHA and its role in addressing inequality in housing?

The book pulled together experts across disciplines to look at the legacy of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), passed more than 50 years ago. The nation is now reckoning with long-standing racial inequality. We bring together an amazing set of scholars from across Penn and the academy who are studying the topic of fair housing: the history of the current context, policies and programs that intersect with it, and the evolution of the challenges and opportunities around it. The book frames these challenges and opportunities from a broad set of perspectives and shows how fair housing permeates every facet of our society. It also shows the challenges of meaningfully addressing longstanding fair housing issues, particularly the racial discrimination that is ingrained in our housing market. It makes the case very clearly for the importance of the Fair Housing Act—how historically significant it was and how valuable it still is to the fight for fair housing. But the book also very clearly makes the case that the Act on its own is not sufficient: policy advances to affirmatively further fair housing are essential but they are often fraught and politically sensitive.

We know that the Fair Housing Act is crucial to addressing issues of racial discrimination, segregation, inequality, and inequity, but we can't stop there. It will take more proactive efforts, more proactive policy, planning, and follow-through to truly dismantle racism in housing markets—along with an acknowledgement that the challenges around fair housing compound and evolve over time, therefore requiring ongoing action.

How is the COVID-19 pandemic affecting these long-standing inequities?

COVID-19 has highlighted and amplified many of the existing, well-documented inequities discussed in the book. There's overwhelming evidence showing that individuals and communities of color, and particularly Black communities, are disproportionately being affected by the pandemic through their employment, housing, and actual exposure to the virus. This moment makes those systemic inequities stark.

There's evidence showing that these same individuals and communities are facing challenges in accessing vaccines in cities like Philadelphia. Even knowing the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 has had on communities of color, we’re still seeing those same communities disproportionately underrepresented in vaccine rollout. It’s such a staggering reminder of the ingrained challenges and the absolute need to fundamentally reshape our approach to thinking about government’s role in proactively planning and addressing these inequities.

In 2017 you helped the City of Philadelphia develop its framework and strategy for preserving its stock of existing affordable housing; in 2018 you worked with the City to write its first citywide housing plan. Through HIP, you have continued to partner with cities to develop housing plans and rental assistance programs. What have you learned about the need for rental assistance programs and their efficacy? How has the pandemic affected these efforts?

At this point, we all know there is a long-standing housing affordability crisis across the country that predated the pandemic. Many things have contributed to this, not the least of which is a retrenchment of the federal government’s support for rental housing—particularly rental housing for lower-income individuals.

Cities need to think constructively and proactively about how to address their housing needs. Our work with the City of Philadelphia highlights opportunities to address challenges around current and long-term housing affordability: to assess, understand, promote, and increase the supply of affordable housing; to think critically about tenant protections and tenant rights; and to promote investment in neighborhoods that doesn’t result in displacement. But the need for rental assistance programs far exceeds the financial capacity of the City of Philadelphia on its own—federal support is needed.

The disproportionate demand for support relative to the number of people actually served of course is not limited to Philadelphia. I'm working with Professor Jovanna Rosen from Rutgers University-Camden and Penn doctoral candidate Joshua Davidson on a study of the City of Los Angeles’ voucher lottery. Over 170,000 households applied for a voucher, 20,000 of which were put on the waitlist—but only a fraction of those on the waitlist are offered a voucher each year and not everyone who is offered a voucher is even able to successfully use it. There’s clearly a need for a distinct federal role in addressing the depth of our housing affordability challenges.

What’s interesting in the current COVID-19 moment is the federal response, which, in many ways, is unprecedented. The $25 billion for rent relief legislated several months ago, and additional support that was just passed, represents a real moment of opportunity for local governments to address affordable housing needs. It’s also an opportunity to make the case that this housing emergency existed before the pandemic and is not going away after the pandemic. Many households consistently face emergencies due to factors outside of their control—not the least of which is systemic racism that affects employment and housing access, opportunities, and stability.

These emergency programs have also created the opportunity to document and understand the critical importance of emergency rental assistance, and rental assistance more broadly on a broad set of outcomes—especially current and future outcomes of youth, which is what we at HIP are doing in a multi-city study. This also allows us to understand program development, design, and implementation, which is the focus of a series of research reports HIP produced with the National Low-Income Housing Coalition and the NYU Furman Center to understand the way governments are setting up their rent relief programs and what seems to be working effectively. One of our reports specifically highlights ways to advance racial equity through the design and implementation of emergency rent relief programs. These local and national studies inform the response to the pandemic and provide critical lessons about the need for affordable housing and safety nets, and the role that government can play in both.

At Penn IUR you are heading up an effort to consider local solutions to the challenge of affordable housing. What are you learning about what works?

We’re learning that there's a lot of innovative stuff going on in cities across the country and that every city is different. We know cities need federal support, but local context matters—programs work differently in different places. We need to acknowledge the import of local contexts, histories, and resources.

In a city like Philadelphia, there's a lot of housing that needs investment. Some new development is needed, but in Philadelphia the primary challenge is to preserve existing housing and ensure that it's affordable. In other cities, like Los Angeles, there is a real challenge to just develop more units at every price point across the market, and particularly for lower-income households.

My colleagues at HIP and I are working on a long-term evaluation of the City of Los Angeles’s rent relief program, including surveying households who apply for rent relief and seeing how it impacts them, and surveying landlords to understand how the pandemic affects them and whether or why they engage in rent relief efforts. We’ve partnered with the City and adjusted our survey to serve the City’s needs as well as our research needs. As a result, we’ve been able to produce a whole lot of data that the City has used to develop and operate their new rent relief program. We have similar partnerships with LA County, the Cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Oakland, Philadelphia, and the State of California, with each partnership and research project taking on a slightly different form. One common theme across all these sites is that, when partnerships with government agencies are reciprocal relationships, we’re more able see connections and opportunities to add value to our civic partners in real time. Support from places like the Stoneleigh Foundation, and Annie E. Casey foundation has allowed us to pursue this work and ensure it doesn’t come at any cost for municipalities who need to use all of their public funds to directly assist households and develop and deliver programs.

All to say, this work shows the importance of local context and the power of partnerships. There’s a distinct value in leveraging our abilities and resources as academics to do applied, practical work that can really inform what these places are doing on a day-to-day basis—and we can do this while acknowledging and undertaking important, broad, more traditional research work like making the case for why rental assistance is critical for long-term outcomes.

Before becoming a professor, you worked as a practitioner in housing finance, first at HUD and then at LISC. What got you interested in housing originally? And why did you make the shift to research and teaching and research?

One of the things that really struck me is that in the world of practice I felt like we were doing amazing work, but there were very few opportunities to take a step back and to objectively analyze: Why are we doing this? Is this the most efficient, best option? I really wanted the space and opportunity to think critically about the effectiveness and efficiency of programs.

My time as a practitioner solidified for me the importance of people on the ground doing this work on a day-to-day basis—but also my real desire to have the opportunity, in many ways the privilege, to take a step back and say: Why are we doing it this way and how can we do it better? That's why in my work I very much try to form a bridge between academia and practice.

I think it’s important to form bridges across disciplines, too. I'm working now in partnership with Professor Megan Ryerson to study the connection between transportation, housing affordability, and jobs. Through an NSF Civic Innovation grant we are working on a project that directly leverages Professor Ryerson’s expertise in transportation, mine in housing, and other expertise at Penn—including Professor Ken Steif’s spatial analytics work and Professor Akira Drake Rodriguez’s critical geography and engagement work—to proactively address issues of spatial mismatch. This project is founded on meaningful partnerships with state housing agencies, regional planning organizations, and transportation organizations. We’re currently in the planning grant phase and hope we receive the ongoing support to proceed with this work. It’s a really exciting project.

In addition to the publication of your recent book in the Penn Press/Penn IUR C21 series, you led a six-part Penn IUR livestream series in Fall 2020 on fair housing. What opportunities do you see for continued collaboration with Penn IUR?

One of the amazing things about Penn IUR is that it contextualizes urban policy questions. We would be doing a disservice to fair housing to view it as just a housing issue. That was the premise of Perspectives on Fair Housing: that this is more than a housing issue. It’s a matter of history, of legal importance and precedence, of economic vitality and growth, of personal human wellbeing, and of broader urban and regional development.

One of the most significant interventions in housing in recent years was the CDC eviction moratorium, which made the case that eviction is a matter of importance to health. Those connections across disciplines—in this case housing and health—are so important. In my eyes, my work on housing is fundamentally at the intersection of housing and other things. With Penn IUR, I see the opportunity to leverage a broad set of conversations and scholarship to ensure that we're framing work on housing within a larger context.