Housing officials described innovative ways to increase housing stability—and takeaways for other cities.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Cities are expanding how they support renters, through eviction diversion, right-to-counsel programs, and new forms of public investment in housing. Much of it began as a pandemic emergency response, but the question now is how these programs can progress to meet today’s housing needs.

At a Bloomberg Center for Cities and the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University co-sponsored event, housing officials from Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia with moderator Nestor M. Davidson of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, described how their cities are keeping renters housed: resolving disputes through mediation, legal help, and rental assistance before they reach court and rethinking housing finance so rents are not driven by investors’ demand for quick returns.

What Each City Has Built

Opening remarks framed the discussion around two important factors in the housing affordability landscape: sustained affordability pressure, which produced a renewed tenants’ rights movement, and COVID-19-era policies that funded experiments at unprecedented scale.

Philadelphia’s eviction diversion program, launched in 2020 and permanent since 2024, gives landlords and tenants 30 days before a filing is possible; a companion project supplies a tenant hotline, courtroom navigators, and right to counsel. Boston’s Office of Housing Stability pairs financial assistance and mediation with a court navigator and its Access to Counsel Program.

The Chicago Residential Investment Fund, four months old and seeded with $130 million in city money, invests in mixed-income buildings in a way that’s different from typical developers’ processes. Hanneke van Deursen, director of special projects at the fund and former Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow, said the program is working on addressing the upstream conditions that create pressure on renters and homeowners.

“Our mandate is for long-term, continuous ownership,” she said. The city provides the capital up front and absorbs the risk, with a lower rate of return but one that will yield profits on a 30-year scale, rather than a typical 5-year turnaround. Once the building is stabilized and residents are paying their rent, the risk profile drops, allowing other sources of capital that may be suited to the project or the city can recycle the funds, feeding them back into more housing development.

Van Deursen said operating on a different timeline also allows the city to increase housing quality and design to improve quality of life for residents in addition to investing in sustainable practices for the long term. “Cities across the country are exploring this option because it’s a much more efficient use of public dollars,” she said.

Joseph Jampel, director of eviction prevention programs for the city of Philadelphia, emphasized that programs like these won’t just benefit renters. “We often talk about those [protections] as not necessarily being just for tenants,” he said, “but as creating a whole system that is going to work better for everybody.”

Working Within State Limits

Panelists described challenges and opportunities when working within local, state, and federal regulations.

Massachusetts is a home rule state, and rent control has been off the table since 1994. “That can’t be the hill that we die on,” said Danielle Johnson, director of the Office of Housing Stability for the city of Boston, “but that offers opportunities to be creative.” For example, one program from the mayor’s office acquired properties to invest in, then they set the rents at a certain amount in perpetuity, which she described as being a very popular policy.

“There’s a lot of people in the city who are passionate about housing,” she said. “We have to figure out a way to use those levers to negotiate so we can ensure tenants remain stably housed.”

Jampel described a similar constraint in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania has no eviction record sealing, and because that change must come from the state, currently an eviction filing stays on a tenant’s record permanently.

That’s why the city’s Eviction Diversion Program includes a 30-day mandatory window, giving both sides—tenant and landlord—time to attempt mediation or negotiation, or access targeted financial assistance. With sealing in place, Jampel said, the program would have considerably more flexibility and breathing room.

“My team works very hard within those 30 days to ensure we don’t get to that evicting filing,” he said.

Landlords and the Cost of Eviction

The city of Boston’s eviction prevention action plan drew on ten years of eviction data and interviews with tenants, landlords, and landlords’ attorneys. According to Johnson, what surfaced the most was communication. Tenants said their landlord treated housing as a business; landlords said the opposite.

“Landlords want to be able to provide housing to people and want to know how to keep tenants in their building,” she said. “And residents need a place to live. It’s all about communication.” And the challenges are different for smaller landlords compared to larger property owners, which is why the city is building a tool kit for landlords to better access resources, including ones that aim to prevent evictions.

Eviction in Massachusetts costs over $10,000 and can take two or three years. Jampel ran the same math from Philadelphia, where a few thousand dollars toward arrears is cheaper for the city, the landlord, and the tenant in the short term compared to an eviction or providing homeless services in the long term.

Van Deursen located the pressure earlier in the process, in the capital stack. Investors seeking 15-20% returns need a quick sale, she said, which makes the real client the next buyer rather than the tenant. The Chicago Residential Investment Fund is unique in that it targets 6% and holds indefinitely. “Turnovers are expensive. Stability is our friend.”

Building Capacity and Collaboration

Van Deursen said funds like hers demand capacity cities spent decades shedding. “The last 40 years have really been marked by disinvestment in public sector capacity, and we’re in a moment now where we can see that we need to build up that capacity.”

Jampel described advocates who pushed for Philadelphia’s programs and now help to implement them, which “helps the folks working on the city side to keep improving.” That coordination is built into his role—the position was created specifically to bring two programs together across departments— and he is working toward a single point of entry. Ideally, he said, the city would create “one-stop shop where folks can come with their needs and get connected with assistance that they’re eligible for.”

Audience questions ranged from landlord-tenant communication and braided financing to preserving expiring affordable housing, how cities use data, and what smaller cities can do with less capacity.

The panelists’ message for other cities was that the work does not require starting big. Smaller cities can scale programs down, they said, whether that means a few attorneys making a difference in a single courtroom or building relationships with the handful of landlords who own a large percentage of the housing stock. Johnson encouraged cities to convene task forces to bring together people in a community who are already doing pieces of the work. With communication at the center, and with systems designed to work for landlords and tenants alike, the panelists said, eviction can often be avoided, saving everyone money and keeping people housed.

“There are distinctive challenges to innovating at the city level, but remarkable resources,” said Davidson.