Call for Papers: Housing Data

From: American Housing Survey (AHS) ListServ <ahs@huduser.org>:

Cityscape is a scholarly journal published three times per year by the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). You can read more about it an access past issues at http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/cityscape.html . I am the editor of the Data Shop department, which publishes short (3000 word) articles on the use of data in housing and urban research. Data Shop articles are aimed at researchers in these fields and intended to alert them to new data, novel applications of existing data, and the operational difficulties of data use. The official description of the department runs:

"Data Shop, a department of Cityscape, presents short articles or notes on the uses of data in housing and urban research. Through this department, PD&R introduces readers to new and overlooked data sources and to improved techniques in using well-known data. The emphasis is on sources and methods that analysts can use in their own work. Researchers often run into knotty data problems involving data interpretation or manipulation that must be solved before a project can proceed, but they seldom get to focus in detail on the solutions to such problems."

If you are interested in contributing such a note, please send me an abstract by November 13 in order to be considered for the July 2010 issue. The timeline would be I would notify you of selection by December 1, and I would want a draft by February 1, with a final version by February 19. If you are interested in making a contribution but cannot meet these deadlines, please send me an abstract for possible publication in later issues.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-402-5890

(Hat tip: Glenn Brown)

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State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods Report Release

The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has just released its State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods 2008 report.

Caroline Bhalla says: "This year we examine more than thirty years of sale price data to better understand how individual neighborhoods fared in the last two upturns and the last two downturns, and to identify trends that can be useful when looking forward. In addition, several new features have been added to this edition of the State of the City, including information on “greening” NYC and on historic districts and landmarks in the City. We've also added new indicators about transportation and proximity to open space."

What I find pretty interesting about the report is the ability to download reports for each of the 59 districts separately, or for the city as a whole. This effort should be useful for any community trying to understand their housing data and plan for a better future.

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Foreclosure Data Part III

One more update, from the NNIP listserve:

Last week, we released a report on how the tightening credit market has affected homebuyers in New York City and the country as a whole. Declining Credit & Growing Disparities: Key Findings from HMDA 2007 uses Federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data released last month to analyze trends in home purchase and refinance lending activity between 2006 and 2007. The report highlights shifts in the high cost and prime markets, and illustrates how declining credit has affected borrowers of different races.

Much of the media’s focus has been on signs of tightening credit over the past few months, but our report illustrates that the flow of credit has been slowing for the housing markets for well over a year. In New York City, we saw dramatic declines in home purchase and refinance activity from 2006 to 2007 (14% and 31% respectively). Nationally, home purchase lending declined by 25% and refinance lending declined by 24%. Moreover, we see troubling signs that New York City's black and Hispanic borrowers are bearing the brunt of this decline in credit, and it is not simply evidence of the subprime market drying up. The number of prime loans awarded to black and Hispanic borrowers fell by 23% and 15% respectively between 2006 and 2007. By contrast, the number of prime loans issued to white borrowers rose by 4% while the number issued to Asians increased by 18%. If these trends continue, and black and Hispanic borrowers are disproportionately affected by the tightening credit market, it may mean less investment in communities of color, an undoing of recent progress in bringing homeownership opportunities to black and Hispanic New Yorkers, and a reshaping of who is buying homes in New York.

We encourage you to take a look and, as always, are interested in your feedback.

Vicki Been & Ingrid Gould Ellen

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More on Foreclosure Data

Before I left for France, I passed along this information from HousingPolicy.org on foreclosure data. That prompted a nice note from Jeff over at PolicyMap, who wrote:

I know you’ve written about PolicyMap.com in the past, and wanted to again recommend it for this topic. As part of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), state and local governments will be charged with creating an action plan for allocating the funds. PolicyMap can help officials to identify areas in need and map the local housing markets. In fact, they just uploaded new HUD NSP data sets to make the process easier and more data-rich.

So I checked what he was talking about, and here it is. The PolicyMap blog explains that:

As an organization either applying to HUD for National Stabilization Program (NSP) grant dollars or interested in the program, you know that HUD expects grantees to consider several specific pieces of data in preparing plans and strategies for targeting funds. To make that work easier, we have mapped all that data and made it available for you on PolicyMap, the online data and mapping tool we created to aid public and social investors in understanding places and considering investment strategies. All public data and use of the tool for this purpose is free.

So check it out! Free data is always good. (And keep the information flowing -- let me know if you have data to share with community indicators practitioners!)

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Data Resources on Preventing Foreclosures

Here's a resource I thought you might be interested in:

Foreclosure Response
Resources on preventing foreclosures & stabilizing communities -- Available through HousingPolicy.org

Across the country, states and localities are engaged in an expedited process to determine how to allocate nearly $4 billion that the federal government is providing to help stabilize the communities that have been hardest hit by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Decisions about how to use these funds, distributed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), need to be made quickly: Initial Action Plans are due by December 1, 2008, and all money must be obligated for use on a specific project within 18 months of receipt.

To help states and communities make informed decisions about how to allocate and spend these funds, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) has developed a dataset with foreclosure "needs scores" for CDBG-jurisdictions within each state. These scores incorporate measures of subprime lending, foreclosures, delinquency, and vacancies to help state and local officials quickly assess the relative needs of different jurisdictions for neighborhood stabilization funding within each state and allocate funds accordingly.

This resource represents the first release from the Foreclosure Response project - a new collaboration of the Center for Housing Policy, Knowledgeplex, LISC, and the Urban Institute. Expected to launch formally within a few months, Foreclosure Response will help practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to access data, analysis and information on foreclosure prevention and neighborhood stabilization.

Direct links to these resources are provided below:

Overview - A brief introduction to the data included in the spreadsheet and how they can be used.

Neighborhood Stabilization Data (Excel) - A detailed spreadsheet showing the relative need for neighborhood stabilization funding among CDBG jurisdictions within each state. This spreadsheet has four tabs:

• Table 1. LISC's Foreclosure Needs Scores for CDBG jurisdictions within each state, along with data on individual components that make up the score.
• Table 2. Data that help states estimate the share of need among communities that fall outside formal CDBG jurisdiction limits.
• Data Definitions. Descriptions of the data shown in each column of Table 1.
• Appendix A. A list of the small number of changes in CDBG jurisdiction boundaries that have taken place since 2005. The data we have provided do not reflect these changes.

Methodology (PDF) - A detailed description of the methodology used to calculate the LISC Foreclosure Needs Scores.

As the Foreclosure Response team continues to prepare information for initial launch of our information portal, we plan to release additional materials that can help communities with the process of developing foreclosure prevention and neighborhood stabilization programs, such as lessons learned from existing programs and more detailed data for local jurisdictions. A full set of resources, including a policy guide, interactive discussion forum, and customizable data reports, will be released in the first part of 2009.

Please check back soon, and let us know if you have suggestions or program examples we should know about by contacting us at feedback@housingpolicy.org .

Best regards,-- The Foreclosure Response Team

(Hat tip: NNIP)

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Atlas of the Real World

The Telegraph published a series of 18 maps of the world that reshape each country according to different variables. The map above represents "Housing prices -- The size of each territory shows the total value of all housing, adjusted for local purchasing power." Check out Japan!

The maps drew attention in some unusual places -- here's Andrew Sullivan's blog discussing these maps. Isn't it fun to see mapping technology and data visualization techniques becoming mainstream public discourse?

There are more maps at StrangeMaps.com -- another one of the blogs referenced on the left-hand side of this blog. If you run across an interesting map, or use one in your work, please share it with me.

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Expert Chat: Housing + Transportation Affordability Index

Upcoming opportunity from KnowledgePlex (http://www.knowledgeplex.org):

The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index: A New Way of Defining Affordability
Thursday, July 31 at 2:00 p.m. ET

A New Way of Defining Affordability: The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and its collaborative partner, the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD), is an innovative tool that measures the true affordability of housing by including the cost of transportation associated with location. Planners, lenders, and most consumers traditionally measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also the intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation expenses.

The latest release of the H + T Index, a project of the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative, includes an interactive mapping site which provides housing and transportation costs at the neighborhood level for 52 metropolitan areas. Additionally, other key characteristics of neighborhoods are presented, including average VMT (vehicle miles traveled), auto ownership rates, employment density, and transit ridership. Recognizing the relationship between urban form, housing site selection, and transportation costs and integrating this way of thinking into the choices and decisions made by home buyers, renters, urban and transportation planners and developers are key factors in creating and establishing true affordability in housing choices.

In this chat, you will have the opportunity to learn about the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index and how it can be used by planners, housing advocates and transportation agencies.

More infomation about this Expert Chat will soon be posted here.

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Orange County Indicators and Homelessness

The 2008 Orange County Community Indicators (pdf) report has been released, and there's some interesting information in it. (I like the display titles at the top of each page/section -- great way to get to the point quickly!)

Here's an interesting update from the Poverty in the OC blog. Looking at the 2008 Orange County Community Indicators (pdf) report, Keith Giles writes:

Orange County is second only to Los Angeles for the largest number of homeless people in the State of California.

The difference is that homelessness in LA County is caused by drug addiction, mental illness or substance abuse related factors.

In Orange County, out of our 35,000 homeless, 80% of them were forced into this lifestyle because of the lack of affordable housing and rent controls.

Think about that. 80% of the people in Orange County who are currently homeless could be living in an apartment anywhere else in the Nation. It's only because of the cost of housing here that they remain homeless.

We make our own homeless.

This means we can also un-make them.

What follows is a further discussion of the data to make the point. Check it out!

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NNIP Testifies at Congressional Hearings

News from the NNIP Listserve:

MAY 2008 - Tom Kingsley, the director of National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), and two local NNIP partners from Memphis and New York City will testify in Congressional hearings over the next two days (May 21 and 22) on the effects of subprime lending on neighborhoods. Both sessions will be shown live via the web (see links below).

The first hearing, entitled “Neighborhoods: The Blameless Victims of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis” will be held on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. (webcast at http://oversight.house.gov/schedule.asp). This session will focus attention on the consequences to neighborhoods when foreclosed properties fail to sell and lead to concentrations of vacant and abandoned houses. Panelists will examine local strategies to mitigate the effects of and prevent vacancies; differences between strong housing markets and weaker ones; and new federal legislation (HR 5818) aimed at addressing the problem. More information about the bill is available at http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h5818/show

During Wednesday’s hearing, Phyllis Betts of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis will demonstrate how foreclosures drive vacancies and blight in high-foreclosure neighborhoods in Memphis. Vicky Been of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University will describe their research in two areas: 1) the impacts of foreclosure notices on the sales prices of nearby properties in New York and 2) the possible effects of foreclosures on New York City’s tenants based on the characteristics of 15,000 buildings that entered foreclosure in 2007.

On Thursday, May 22 at 2:00 p.m., the second hearing on “Targeting Federal Aid to Neighborhoods Distressed by the Subprime Mortgage Crisis” will explore the potential for federal assistance to localities most affected by foreclosures (simulcast at http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/hr0522083.shtml). Tom Kingsley, Director of NNIP, will comment on the principles and potential indicators to include in the creation of the funding formula. Other panelists will include Chris Walker of LISC and Todd Richardson of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The testimony of the NNIP representatives can be found at http://www2.urban.org/nnip/subprime.html. NNIP partners are at the forefront of measuring the neighborhood-level effects of subprime lending and foreclosures in their cities and contributing to evidence-based local policy and program responses. The partnership will be collecting stories and citations of this work over the coming months to offer examples for other communities dealing with this issue.

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Urban Markets Initiative at Brookings Launches New Website

I received this invitation from Norris Dickard of the Metropolitan Policy Program, Urban Markets Institute over at the Brookings Institution. You may want to check it out.

I hope that you will join the Metropolitan Policy Program’s Urban Markets Initiative (UMI) as we host a demonstration of a new interactive mapping website for the Housing & Transportation Affordability Index, developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology in collaboration with UMI. A panel discussion on transportation and affordable housing will follow.

The event will take place April 9, 2008, 9:00 – 10:30am., at the Brookings Institution (1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW) in Washington, D.C.With the availability of affordable housing a formidable obstacle for many Americans, it is imperative that homeowners understand the full cost implications of location in the purchase of a home – that buying in outlying suburbs without access to public transportation, requiring a long commute by car, may not necessarily afford them the cost savings they envisioned.

The traditional measure of housing affordability used by planners and lenders states that a household should spend no more than 30 percent of its income on housing. In contrast, the new Housing and Transportation Affordability Index takes into account not just the cost of housing, but housing and the transportation costs associated with its location. The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s research shows that the cost of transportation can vary from 14% of a the average household’s budget in compact transit-rich communities, to 28% or more in less dense areas far from employment and other amenities. Working families have a greater burden – for some transportation costs may approach 50% of their household income.

Better information on the combined costs of housing and transportation by location must be made available, as more knowledge about transportation costs will lead to greater understanding that the cost of living is much higher than it needs to be.The index models neighborhood-level data for 52 different metropolitan areas across the United States and presents it in an interactive, online mapping application which can be used by individuals, urban planners, and transportation and housing advocates to support improved decision-making and analysis.

The event will include a demonstration of the new website by Dr. Peter Haas, PhD of CNT followed by a panel discussion moderated by me, and featuring Scott Bernstein, President of Center for Neighborhood Technology, Conrad Egan, President & CEO of the National Housing Conference, and Mariia Zimmerman, Vice President for Policy of Reconnecting America, followed by ample time for audience questions.

Drop me an e-mail if you need more information and I'll connect you with the RSVP/contact information. I'll post the website after the launch.

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Housing Statistics Users Group

For those who are interested in indicators around housing, the Housing Statistucs Users Group is a group of government agencies, private companies and non-profit organizations in the Washington D.C. area who meet 3-4 times per year and are sharing what they talk about with the larger indicators community. Here's an update from their April 2007 meeting, provided by way of the NNIP listserve:

Highlights:

Presentation by Jeffrey Passel, Pew Hispanic Center on Immigration & Housing: Numbers, Trends & Outlook. For more information visit: www.pewhispanic.org .

HUD Aggregated USPS Administrative Data on Address Vacancies:

• HUD has a new agreement with USPS that will provide them on a quarterly basis with data about the number of addresses (aggregated to census tract level), the total vacant addresses, and the total "no-stat" address (new construction, rural long-term vacancy, or other not likely to be active for some time). HUD will also report the number of days and an address has been in each category (starting Nov. '05).
• This data has never really been analyzed and one potential advantage of this data is that it will be accessible only a few days after the end of each quarter so that one can have nearly real-time knowledge of vacancies.
• Data is available on http://www.huduser.org/datasets/usps.html and they are looking feedback on the data and recommendations for what types of aggregate data would be beneficial.

Other Topics:

Data Developments @ HUD:

• Survey of Market Absorption and Survey of Manufactured Housing Placement got funding for FY07 and hopefully will continue in future years.

• 2007 AHS is officially in the fields and will include the metro areas and national survey at the same time. A new survey instrument is being used which is windows based, therefore quality control is expected to take longer. National data is expected to be available on 8/2008 and metro data by the end of 2008.

• CINCH and Rental Dynamics Reports for the 2005 survey should be available on the HUD site soon.

• FY07 area median income data has been published and is up on the web.

Federal Statistics Update: Ed Spar: Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS)

Census Update: Housing Unit Based Research Team (HUBRT) investigating the possibility of using housing unit based population estimates instead of the current use of administrative data to come up with county population estimates.

• ACS: Proposed revisions to the 2008 ACS are coming out next month for comments and will include questions about health insurance coverage, veteran status and marital history. ACS 5 year averages data is available to study what happens to the 5 year averages in the 30 test counties.

• National Center for Health Statistics: will be flat funded once again. They are considering eliminating one month of collection of vital statistics (i.e. Births/deaths) due to lack of funds.

• See more including info on budgets on the COPAFS website: http://members.aol.com/copafs/

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Affordable Housing Indicators

Housing prices have been skyrocketing, far exceeding growth in median household income or average annual wage, and affordable housing has become a key priority for many communities. Finding a good indicator to express the complexity of the problem in affordable housing has been difficult.

The Brookings Institution's Urban Markets Initiative has developed The Affordability Index for certain metro areas that tries to combine the cost of transportation with the geographic location of housing. The formula is [(Housing Costs + Modeled Transportation Costs)/Income]. For areas where infill development and gentrification have pushed affordable housing farther and farther away from job centers, the index does a pretty good job of capturing the cost difference of housing near work v. far away.

A number of housing data clearinghouses, like The Shimberg Center in Florida or DataPlace nationwide, provide a great deal of useful data and information about housing. Don't forget to check out the national Affordable Housing Resource Center. I look to the Florida Association of Realtors for housing sales data in Florida, as well as interesting national comparatives.

But the debate over what affordable housing is has been shifting. We're starting to hear more people talk about "workforce housing" as well as or instead of "affordable housing", and shifting the focus of public policy and debate. A recent article (March 17) in the Sun-Herald in Charlotte, Florida, discussed a North Port housing study:

For the purpose of the study, planners identified three types of housing -- affordable, workforce and market.

Affordable is defined as housing for those earning less than 80 percent (of median area income) or $46,720. There are also three affordable housing types -- extremely low, very low and low.

Workforce housing is defined as affordable for housing for those making between 80 and 120 percent of the area median income, or between $46,720 and $70,080.

The last category is market, which is deemed housing affordable to those earning 120 percent or more of the area median income -- $58,400 is median income for the area, so that's the number we used. Most state agencies say households should not pay more that 33 percent of their income for rent, utilities and mortgage.

Those categories -- affordable, workforce, and market -- are still measured by the ratio of household income to housing cost -- purchase or rental price. But a few new variables are starting to impact heavily the notion of housing affordability.

The rise in the number of households using sub-prime lenders for conventional home purchase loans creates housing affordability problems that aren't necessarily reflecting in the purchase price of the homes. Post-Katrina (and in Florida, post-2004), the rise in the cost of homeowner's insurance also impacts housing affordability. Florida is also debating at the state level some measure of property tax relief, because property taxes also impact affordability. Utility costs have been increasing, but aren't often included in housing affordability discussions.

These Census Bureau reports aren't current, but provide useful background information. The Census also provides monthly mortgage costs as a percentage of household income, and gross rent costs as a percentage of household income. The American Community Survey provides data on the percentage of the population that is housing cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing (rent, mortgage, or owners without a mortgage).

These options measure the housed, however. And it is still difficult to extract from the indicators some sense of how many households need housing more affordable than they currently have.

Are there better ideas/data sources for measuring housing affordability?

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