Local housing policy seeks to balance private sector realities with public sector goals. Key concerns of local decision-makers include availability, affordability, and accessibility of housing stock. Effective housing policy development requires awareness of the types and extent of local housing need as well as the barriers to private sector investment. Accordingly, local decision-makers seek reliable and current sources of data to help set their housing policy priorities. This process might face hardships due to time and budget limits, inflexible tabulation formats, lack of detail and time sensitivity in data sources. In this project, we explored how much and what types of data are available to describe local housing markets. We obtained, reorganized, categorized, and analyzed data sets from a wide variety of housing-related sources. Finally, we provided a set of housing-related indicators summarized and visualized in a unified format to provide decision-makers with the opportunity of housing status evaluation and comparison among different geographical levels of communities.
Project Team
The Exploratory Measures for Analysis of Local Housing Needs project was completed in 2022 by the following team members.