Accessing private market housing

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in accessing private market housing. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Housing stability: Number and share of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year. These data are collected by local public school districts.

• Housing affordability: Ratio of affordable and available housing units to households with low, very low, and extremely low income levels. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Local Income Bands.
  

• Economic inclusion: Share of people experiencing poverty who live in high-poverty neighborhoods. These data are available in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Racial diversity:Index of people’s exposure to neighbors of different races and ethnicities. These data are available through the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Opportunities for wealth-building: Ratio of the share of a community’s housing wealth held by a racial or ethnic group to the share of households of the same group. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Develop a streamlined process: Identifying, financing, and moving to a new home requires significant time and effort, and low- and moderate-income households typically have fewer resources to navigate the process. Programs that are simple, fast, and responsive to each household’s needs are more likely to build trust and have high uptake.
  
• Prioritize partnerships and community engagement: Increasing access to market rate housing requires resources and expertise rarely present within a single organization. Cross-sector partnerships can build trust and the capacity to work at scale. 
  
• Embed evaluation capacity: Identifying and monitoring performance indicators allows a program to make ongoing improvements and determine if it is meeting community needs. Measuring strong performance can also help make the case for greater future investment.
  
• Identify a consistent funding source: In stronger markets, increasing access to market-rate housing is an on-going project. Identifying dedicated revenue sources, like linkage fees, demolition taxes, or TIF districts, will ensure down payment assistance programs, housing navigator programs, and other efforts can operate predictably and at-scale.
  
• Leverage public properties: Developing additional housing on publicly owned properties increases the housing supply and puts downward pressure on housing prices. Localities can redevelop land to include housing alongside public uses (e.g., housing above a library) or take advantage of unused properties (e.g., redeveloping a closed school building). Additionally, localities can acquire and encourage the redevelopment of vacant or abandoned housing through mechanisms like land banks.