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HUD Tools for State and Local Governments

By Todd Richardson, General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research

 

August 31, 2022

 

In the real estate business, as the saying goes, it is location, location, location. Decisions made by states and local governments impact where you can build, what you can build, how you can build it, how much it will cost. There are over 40,000 local governments, and each seems to do things differently. While this diversity in approach contributes to our housing shortfall, there’s a silver lining: best practices to equitably expand the supply of housing can be developed and replicated through peer learning.

The federal government has had a lot of influence on housing supply historically as well as in contemporary policy making – interest rates, grants, financing, and federal tax incentives – and the federal government has a responsibility to implement civil rights laws, including fair housing laws.

HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) provides research and data that supports the federal policy making within HUD. PD&R also provides a service to state and local governments by providing a repository of data and research to show what others are doing and, sometimes, what is working and what is not.

Let’s start with data. We make it easy to get real time data for communities with our Market-at-a-Glance tool. This tool, updated monthly, shows local trends for employment, population change, and building permits for every county, metropolitan area, and state in the country. Plus, if we have recently done a market study for the area, we provide our latest thinking on the rental and housing market in your community.

We also provide in-depth local housing market analysis with two other public products:

  • Comprehensive Housing Market Analyses use dozens of local and national data sources to take a deep dive into understanding the housing market conditions of more than 40 local housing markets each year. Included in these analyses are estimates of the local need for new rental and for sale housing.
  • Market Profiles discuss economic activity, population changes, building activity, and sales and rental market conditions with a focus on the most recent 24 months for roughly 60 local markets each year.

It is helpful to know how much HUD assistance is already in your community. If you are looking for this information, our Community Assessment Reporting is a one-stop-shop. You simply pick the geography of interest – city, county, metropolitan area, state, Congressional District – and this tool shows both how much money HUD is investing and how many people are served in your community by rental housing assistance programs, the Federal Housing Administration, and HUD’s various block grant programs.

Finally, if you, like me, want some real-time data about what is happening in the housing market at the neighborhood level, we have data from the United States Postal Service (USPS). This data is updated quarterly, and you can track neighborhood change in terms of number of units occupied in near real time. These data are available only to state and local governments, researchers, and non-profit organizations. A related data set that tracks how affordable the rents are in a neighborhood can be intuited using change in Housing Choice Voucher unit counts over time.

For at least two decades, with the goal of supporting the creation and maintenance of affordable housing, HUD has been compiling information from all over the country in the Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse (RBC). There is a lot of information in the RBC. The best way to use the site is to have something you’d like to know and then search for it. For example, I zipped around the site to answer a few recent questions I had:

Question: What are other folks doing to preserve affordable housing in an area that seems to be gentrifying?
Answer: Preserving Affordable Housing in Gentrifying Chicago Neighborhoods

Question: How are jurisdictions trying to protect homeowners in investor-owned mobile home parks from being priced out of their homes?
Answer: Colorado Legislation Protects Tenants in Mobile Home Parks

Question: How are places trying to create affordable housing without subsidy through the development of Accessory Dwelling Units?
Answer: Reducing Regulation Expands ADU Construction in California

The RBC also features in-depth research on how some regulations are pushing up the cost of housing and what some jurisdictions are doing to loosen up those rules. A recent report identifies particularly high-cost metropolitan areas and summarizes efforts to reduce the regulatory barriers.

If you’d like to get a periodic feed of what’s new on the RBC, sign up for the PD&R email list.

We have a lot to learn from each other-PD&R is working to curate that information so you can make the best use of it. Together, we can bring down the cost of housing for all of us.