Maintaining safe and healthy housing

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

The Urban Institute has developed an indicator framework 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 maintaining safe and healthy 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.

• Social capital: Number of membership associations per 10,000 people and the ratio of residents’ Facebook friends with higher socioeconomic status to their Facebook friends with lower socioeconomic status. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns and Opportunity Insights’ Social Capital Atlas, respectively.

• Environmental quality: Examine air quality. These data are available from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index.

• Safety from trauma: Number of deaths due to injury per 100,000 people. These data are available from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Mortality File and the CDC’s WONDER database.

• Safety from crime: Reported property crimes per 100,000 people and reported violent crimes per 100,000 people. These data are available from the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

• Roll out the program gradually: Many healthy homes and housing quality programs include significant overhauls to existing inspection and related processes. By rolling out a program in a single neighborhood (ideally one with a relatively high rate of unremediated hazards), program leaders can identify and resolve challenges before broader implementation.
• Engage with tenants and landlords: Public education efforts should be a foundation of any healthy homes and housing quality program. Tenants and property owners must be provided the resources necessary to identify hazards and how to approach remediation (i.e. scheduling an inspection or applying for a rehabilitation loan). Education can be delivered in a range of ways, including printed materials in multiple languages, public information sessions in community centers, social media campaigns, and more.
• Build public trust: A common challenge with proactive home inspection programs is hesitance in allowing government employees into a home voluntarily. To address this dynamic, encourage inspectors to participate in community events and regularly speak to residents. It is especially important for inspectors to demonstrate a solutions-oriented, rather than punitive, approach. This can include warnings instead of fines for good-faith efforts that are delayed, follow-up reminders on deadlines for loan programs, and more.
• Cultivate buy-in among inspectors: Home inspectors often anchor healthy homes and housing quality programs; if a tenant attends an education session and then recognizes a hazard, the program relies on an inspector to conduct a home visit and follow-up to ensure remediation. Because such programs often involve significant changes to an inspector’s schedule and responsibilities, it is crucial to prioritize cultivating buy-in among them during the program design phase.
• Leverage data to set priorities: Many programs focus on increasing inspector efficiency rather than increasing staff. To do so, jurisdictions invest in data management software that can help inform the home inspection process. For instance, data tools can be used to draw territories that balance inspector caseloads, rather than by an arbitrary geographic boundary; inspectors can use the analysis to plan and prioritize their inspection routes; and investment in technology (such as tablets) can allow for real-time data collection and analysis.