Evictions are about to restart as tenants wait on billions in unspent rental aid
Reporting and writing by Jonathan O’Connell, Anu Narayanswamy and Rachel Siegel; data analysis and visualization by Alyssa Fowers
During the pandemic, emergency rental assistance was paid for by the federal government, but administered by state and local governments. Many of those governments developed arcane application processes and were slow to release funds, meaning that only 12 percent of the aid had been distributed after 6 months.
For this story, I analyzed the funds released by each program and created a graphic that would show the share of funds released over time.
I was fascinated by the disparities in how the programs were administered, so I took the initiative to start tracking how someone could obtain funds in different places. That led to a second story with Ashlyn Still showing how convoluted the process could be, with an updated version of the original sankey diagram:
