Analyze
Use data to explore local housing needs and to help shape your local housing strategy
Analyzing readily available data can provide essential insights into the extent of your local housing needs. Data can help you make a case for developing a local housing strategy, determine the objectives you want the strategy to achieve, and guide how to allocate your resources most effectively. It can also help you evaluate how different sets of policies may affect the decisions made by developers to produce new housing and rehabilitate existing structures, as well as help you monitor and evaluate progress as you implement your local housing strategy.
While each community will approach these activities differently depending on their local context and resources, the links below provide guidance on how to use data to inform your comprehensive local housing strategy.
Housing needs assessment tool
The Housing Needs Assessment Tool identifies key data points that can help you assess your local housing needs, shows you how to display that data using figures/maps/charts/etc. (”visualizations”) and how to combine those visualizations with text to illuminate different aspects of your local housing needs. You can watch a video on how the tool generates data here.
Using local housing data
Locally generated data, interviews, and surveys can add valuable insights into the nature and extent of a locality’s housing needs and provide it on a timelier basis. Such data can help local officials determine how to best address those needs in a local housing strategy, decide what objectives to pursue in its strategy, how to allocate housing resources, evaluate the effectiveness of different policies, and monitor and evaluate progress as the local housing strategy is implemented. Learn more about using local data.
Gauging development feasibility
By creating a real estate pro forma you can gain an understanding of the basic economics facing real estate development in your community given such factors as the costs of land, construction, and on-going management of the property. This brief explains how a real estate pro forma can help you understand the possible impacts housing policies can have on the economics of developing housing.
Using data to address housing inequities
Cities can begin to address housing disparities by turning data into actionable insights. This Lab will soon publish a brief outlining the various data sources that localities can use to first uncover inequities and another on providing guidance on using data to evaluate the efficacy of interventions.