Housing is a critical pillar of health, stability, and community well-being. Where people live and their ability to comfortably afford a home that meets their needs sets the foundation for every other aspect of life.  

For many families, safe and affordable housing is the top priority, but it has become increasingly difficult to access. Housing costs are rising out of reach for many residents, leading to impossible trade-offs between housing, food, and medicine and contributing to increasing rates of eviction, foreclosure, and displacement.  

At the same time, much of our existing housing is aging without adequate resources to maintain it, making it so that housing conditions are not always safe. And adapting our housing for a healthier, more connected, and climate-resilient future presents another challenge. 

To solve these problems, organizations and community groups across the country have sought changes in local and state policy. Local housing data can be a valuable tool in these efforts, translating general perceptions of housing challenges into facts and figures.  

This third post in our Equity in Action blog series showcases 12 grantees who are using local data to expand access to housing that is safe and affordable and brings communities together. Their projects investigate housing issues using a range of methods, including community engagement, resident surveys, and quantitative analysis of parcel data.  

Four grantees are distributing surveys to understand residents’ experiences with pressing housing challenges in their communities. Amid rising temperatures in Tucson, Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, Sonora Environmental Research Institute is surveying the climate vulnerabilities of the city’s housing stock to prioritize climate mitigation and sustainability resources. The Ramah Navajo School Board Inc. in New Mexico is surveying all Ramah households and conducting housing quality assessments of the community’s aging housing stock to assess health impacts and advocate for needed investment in the tribal community’s housing. In West Jackson, Mississippi, the Center for Community Progress and Revive & Restore Community Corporation are conducting a windshield survey to assess occupancy and property conditions to set priorities for home repair. Front Step Community Land Trust is using mixed methods, including surveys and tenant engagement, to gather insight on the impacts and needs surrounding housing instability and displacement in four Missoula, Montana, neighborhoods.  

Several grantees are tackling issues with housing affordability and displacement pressures in their communities. For two grantees—JustFix in New York City and Pattern for Progress in the outlying Hudson Valley—this will take the shape of data dashboards that track indicators of tenant instability and corporate ownership of housing, respectively, to alert residents to corporate ownership and landlord activity patterns and, in doing so, deliver proof to residents that the affordability challenges they experience in isolation are systemic and have identifiable causes—spurring community-led action to preserve housing affordability and stability and increase opportunities for homeownership. Grantees Muncie Land Bank in Muncie, Indiana, and Community Information Now in San Antonio, Texas, are using resident insights along with property data to identify the drivers of tax delinquency and tax foreclosures. Using the data, they will create policy recommendations to support vulnerable homeowners, prevent tax foreclosures, and identify pathways for tax-delinquent properties to be leveraged for equitable community revitalization. PODER Emma is developing a public data tool analyzing neighborhood housing trends, which will be interpreted by residents in Emma, North Carolina, to create a community-led action plan to preserve housing affordability, particularly of manufactured housing units.  

Where housing is built, and the local policies that govern its production, affect people’s health, their ability to get around, and their housing choices. Three grantees are investigating these community-scale housing development patterns. In the District of Columbia, Greater Greater Washington Commons is mapping the links between multifamily housing development and exposure to public health risks to advocate for changes in zoning regulations that would allow for more types of housing to be built throughout the District. Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology is also studying the impacts of zoning, measuring parking utilization to assess the effects of a recently passed zoning ordinance to advance transit-oriented housing development. In Louisville, Kentucky, Gathering Strength is conducting a needs assessment of the city’s supply of accessible and affordable housing. Through the collection of housing and demographic data, Gathering Strength will estimate the housing needs of the city’s disabled residents to advocate for expanded production of accessible and affordable housing.  

What These Communities Can Teach Us 

Taken together, these 12 projects show us that the simple goal of safe and affordable housing is in fact a complex condition of place that is context specific. Some communities are facing gentrification and rapidly rising housing costs; others are at the forefront of adapting their housing to be resilient to a changing climate. These projects will highlight how local residents and community-driven organizations are the stakeholders best positioned to gather data and to interpret them to find the most effective solutions.  

About the Initiative 

The Local Data for Equitable Communities grant program, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is supporting 30 grantee organizations across the country to use local data and community experience to improve the physical, social, or economic conditions specific to those places. These projects span rural and urban areas, engage a broad range of community members, and address issues such as food access, housing and land use, climate, sustainability, and justice.   

Learn more about the Local Data for Equitable Communities grantees. 

Stay Connected 

Sign up for the Housing and Communities Division newsletter to receive updates on this program and other work at the intersection of food access and community development. Share this with a colleague who works in or is interested in this space.  

Our next post is this series will share grantee projects focused on environmental justice. Stay tuned.