A new report from The Boston Foundation and the UMass Donahue Institute is calling for the state rental assistance infrastructure built up during the COVID-19 pandemic to be maintained once the current package of federal COVID aid expires.

The pandemic exposed the degree to which Massachusetts’ long-running housing crisis hurt Black and Latinx communities the most, said Mark Melnik, coauthor of the annual Greater Boston Housing Report Card and director of economic and public policy research at the Donahue Institute.

Before the pandemic, 27 percent of Greater Boston Hispanic renters and 27 percent of Black renters were spending half their income or more on housing costs, compared to 21 percent and 22 percent of white and Asian renters, respectively. Among homeowners, the disparity was even worse: 17 percent of area Hispanic homeowners and 17 percent of Black homeowners were doing the same, compared to 10 percent of white homeowners and 11 percent of Asian homeowners.

When the pandemic hit, these realities meant that Black and Latinx households were stretched to the limit as COVID-19 sent service industries like hotels and personal care into tailspins, Melnik said – the same industries that had large concentrations of Black and Latinx workers. Both communities

The result: Greater Boston’s Black and Latinx households were much more likely to miss housing payments despite the wave of federal, state and local rental assistance. Between mid-August 2020 and March 2021, over 21 percent of Black households and 20 percent of Hispanic households missed a rental or mortgage payment, the report said, citing data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey. Among white area residents, 8.4 percent missed at least one payment between mid-August 2020 and late October, and 6.8 percent missed at least one payment between late October and the end of March. For Asian households, those figures were 11.7 percent and 13.8 percent, respectively.

“The data illustrate the remarkable racial and income disparities that persist – continue to persist among Greater Boston families,” The Boston Foundation President Lee Pelton said in a webinar reviewing the report’s findings Wednesday morning. “Perhaps most troubling, it’s a situation we could all see coming.”

At the same time, Melnik and his coauthors write, the problem could have been even worse. The same Census survey data showed that 52 percent Boston-area residents spent their stimulus checks on housing costs, second only to the 69 percent of Boston-area residents who used the money to pay for food, the report said.

While eviction rates continue to be steady, albeit much lower than national averages, the report says the network of rental assistance programs created to administer hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local emergency funds should not be dismantled as Massachusetts returns to a more normal state of affairs.

“We know that the housing stability crisis will not disappear once the pandemic has subsided. A housing stability crisis has always existed in Massachusetts due to the lack of affordable, safe rental housing,” the report said. “[W]ithout the safety net of rental assistance programs moving forward, we are doomed to repeat the loop of housing instability, eviction, displacement and homelessness.”

Instead, Melnik and other authors write that the programs should be formalized and the application process streamlined to be ready when a tenant or homeowner is in danger of losing shelter, particularly before a court gets involved. When a case comes before a court, the authors say, the mediation and diversion procedures the state’s courts adopted should continue.

The state’s emergency eviction diversion programs have not been without their critics, however, with some landlords criticizing the speed with which applications are being processed and bureaucratic hurdles which have kept more than 1 in 3 of the people who apply for rental aid from getting an application approved.

During a panel discussion following the report’s release, Amy Stitely, chief of programs at the state Department of Housing and Community Development said that the state was spending around “$1 million a day in $5,000 increments across the state” in rental assistance payments.