Penn Today
COVID-19 and the Housing Crisis
Amy Castro Baker has been in the news lately. As an assistant professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice, her research areas—the housing market and universal basic income—have come front and center as government grapples with the economic reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment rates are up 13%, as people working in the service and hospitality industries have been laid off and those working in the gig economy struggle for their next bookings. “This public health crisis,” says Castro Baker, is “exposing the fractures that have been in our economy and our community since the housing crisis in 2008. It’s really pulling back the curtain on the fact that we’ve been a house of cards for a really long time.”