The Risks of Renting on the Margins: Housing Informality and State Legibility in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Welfare programs place burdens on citizens to document their vulnerability through means-tested regulations in the United States, but theories of the welfare state do not necessarily account for mismatches between residents’ eligibility and their legibility to state infrastructure. Focusing on housing instability during the COVID-19 pandemic, we explain how Chicago residents who were eligible for emergency rental assistance programs (ERAPs) were unable to render their vulnerability and survival strategies legible to formal bureaucratic systems. This meant that despite the extensive federal funding allocated to state and municipal ERAPs during the pandemic, many people who were behind on rent did not even apply for support. Based on 76 in-depth interviews with low-income renters and 25 interviews with people working with these programs in Chicago, we document three mismatches between renters’ survival strategies and the requirements of formal bureaucratic systems of categorization. First, we illustrate how people who informally leased apartments in Chicago struggled to properly document their housing instability and the administrative burdens they faced in doing so. Second, because of acute housing precarity and fear of eviction, some renters prioritized their rent over other needs and then could not translate their vulnerability into ERAP eligibility. Third, we explain how undocumented Chicagoans often avoided ERAPs because of the perceived risks associated with becoming legible to the state. Being unable or unwilling to access aid created a cascade of other precarious conditions.