1. How to measure and identify community affordable housing needs
A Home for Everyone Conference, July 2017
Kurt Paulsen, PhD, AICP
UW-Madison, Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning

2. Key points
As part of a strategy (involving stakeholders, communicating with elected officials) use key data points to:
Express need
Show changes or show comparisons
Tell a story (connect the data to real people’s lives and stories)
Motivate and mobilize for action
The idea of the “gap” – difference between what people make and what housing costs; or households who are “cost-burdened.”
“…provide an adequate housing supply that meets existing and forecasted housing demand … and provide a range of housing choices that meet the needs of persons of all income levels and of all age groups and persons with special needs, … and promote the availability of land for the development or redevelopment of low–income and moderate– income housing …” (Wis. Stat. § (2)(b))

4. Housing Demand Drivers of housing demand: households and income
How many?
Structure (seniors? 1 person households? With kids?)
These are easily accessible: (enter community name under “Community Facts”)

5. Housing Demand: income
“Persons of all income levels…”
Use HUD’s “Area Median Income” (or AMI, also called CMI). More complicated to get and talk about, better than Census.
There’s actually an app/mobile interface:

6. Key findings: community balance
Madison has less than 48 percent of county population but houses 73 percent of extremely-low-income renter households.

7. Key findings: future scenarios
Range of scenarios to remedy existing gaps + provide for future needs through 2040.
Affordable “need”  650 to 1200 per year

8. Housing Demand: income
Another way to think about income is to look at the wages people ACTUALLY earn in your community.
This is a little more complicated, but serves us well in Dane County to think about “Workforce Housing.”
(click on your metropolitan area)

9. Maximum affordable house, by occupation
Median sales price (Dane County): $221,000

10. Who is Dane County’s Workforce?

11. Who is Dane County’s Workforce?

12. Housing Prices/Costs
Goal here is to help people understand the relationship between actual incomes and housing costs.

14. Document Housing Need Multiple sources, present all together
DPI: Homeless school children by school district data:
Housing Vacancy/Rental Vacancy data
Data from local housing providers, homeless service providers (CofC), non-profits.
Data on voucher/PH wait lists from local PHA.

15. Document Housing Need (con’t)
Use HUD data on cost-burdened owners/renters by income category (
Key data point is number (and percentages) of ELI and VLI renter households severely cost-burdened.
Also shows data on cost-burdened homeowners
These are people who ALREADY LIVE IN YOUR COMMUNITY
Use Urban Institute’s “Mapping America’s Rental Housing Crisis”: