Moving From Crisis to Stability? The Success and Limits of an Eviction Prevention Program

Eviction prevention policies are often crafted to focus on either an upstream approach, prior to households interacting with eviction court, or a downstream approach, once the court process has begun and when households are in an acute housing crisis. This paper examines one such upstream approach, the Virginia Eviction Reduction Pilot (VERP) program, implemented in a first phase from 2021 to 2022 in the context of statewide Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) and state and federal tenant protections. The paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to measure the effect of VERP on filings and judgments in areas served by the program and in-depth interviews with program staff to elucidate how VERP functioned as an upstream eviction prevention program during a volatile policy landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic. While we find no statistically significant effect of VERP on filings and judgments, we triangulate interview data to detail how VERP functioned in a rapidly changing policy environment to stabilize households by leveraging ERA funds. We find that the end of COVID eviction policies like ERA placed increasing pressure on VERP to fill a void it was not designed to address, and so effectively implementing upstream policies requires consistent and robust downstream assistance.