Center For Housing Policy

The Center for Housing Policy, the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference, combines research and practical, real-world expertise to develop effective national, state and local policy solutions that increase the availability of high-quality affordable homes. The Center will use this grant to plan and execute a one-and-a-half day convening that will facilitate peer-to-peer exchange among How Housing Matters researchers, and to plan for three or four smaller, topic-focused gatherings to be held in 2013.

The Center for Housing Policy will use this grant to refine and distribute an online multivariate model developed under a prior grant that analyzes the comparative costs of developing affordable rental housing through new construction or preservation. This project tests an underlying proposition of MacArthur’s Window of Opportunity affordable rental housing initiative--that preserving affordable housing is more cost-effective than new construction. Making the model freely available online will allow for broader testing using additional property-level data. Crowdsourcing ideas to further refine the model should increase its ability to identify appropriate investor-level investment decisions and inform housing policy.

To research housing strategies that benefit working families (over four years).

To develop a methodology to measure the cost of rental housing preservation, and the complete a Request for Qualifications process to identify organizations interested in conducting a cost study using the methodology.

In support of research on housing strategies that benefit working families (over three years).