Housing Needs Assessment

Your team may have first-hand knowledge about your communities’ needs, but it is important to gather big-picture information. A needs assessment can help steer the overall direction of the project and save valuable time and resources over the lifetime of the project.

If your town or city has conducted a Housing Needs Assessment in recent years, seek it out. Also, Local Housing Solutions offers a Housing Needs Assessment tool, which provides detailed reports for every city, county, and metropolitan statistical area in the country.

A needs assessment may help you understand the number of units that are needed for development and the bedroom size of those units. It can also help narrow down location preferences, building typology and amenities needed in the community.

Housing needs assessments document the unmet housing needs in a market. This is typically accomplished by comparing the overall housing needs to the current supply of housing to determine what portion of the needs are unmet. In the absence of a dedicated housing needs assessment, there may be other local plans and studies that document unmet housing needs in the neighborhood, community, or region. Because housing needs are typically large and diverse, housing needs assessments can be undertaken while simultaneously working on a development project.

Collecting Data

Your team may have first-hand knowledge about your communities’ needs, but it is important to gather big-picture information. A needs assessment can help steer the overall direction of the project and save valuable time and resources over the lifetime of the project. A needs assessment may highlight the number of units needed for development and the bedroom size of those units. It can also help narrow down location preferences, building typology and amenities needed in the community.

There are different ways you can gather information about community needs, including:

• Surveys

• Interviews

• Focus groups

• Focused outreach (youth, seniors, individuals with lived experience of homelessness)

• Review of secondary data

Using one, or a combination, of these methods can ensure community members are effectively engaged in housing development that meets their needs. Before heading out into the community and administering a survey, review the following with your team:

• Clarify what you want to know.

• Don’t ask too many questions.

• Determine who you want to hear from.

• Determine how you will collect information.

• Clarify how many respondents you’d like to hear from.

• Determine who you might partner with to conduct your assessment.

• Include a budget for incentives for survey participants.

• Ensure that there is intentional outreach and engagement with people who may be end users of the housing.

Once the survey is complete, analyzing and presenting the data will be key to understanding trends and needs in the community. Training local community members to collect the survey data is a best practice; it can create a local (even if temporary) job and can potentially increase participation from community members and the accuracy of the data collected. Results should be shared and discussed with neighborhood leaders, community members and staff.

Community Surveys

In addition to the needs assessment, you may want to conduct surveys to ascertain the community’s interest in a specific project. It is important to consider local context and facilitate community involvement in the survey implementation process to ensure sufficient and accurate results.

1. Be thorough, but don’t be greedy. Strike a balance between the desire to accommodate data requests from various stakeholders and the practical necessity of limiting the amount of time it takes each community member to complete the questionnaire. To arrive at a thorough yet succinct survey, be sure to set common objectives and priorities among stakeholders during the survey design phase.

2. An informed community is a cooperative community. Explain the purpose of the project through community events and all available communication channels. Don’t overlook the power of word-of-mouth: all field staff are ambassadors of the project and should be able to confidently explain the purpose of the project. An informative door hanger and a reasonable incentive that is easily used locally can help encourage community participation and increase response rates. At project closure, don’t forget to share the results and decisions with the community to demonstrate that their voice was heard, and their participation is valued.

3. A dedicated local team is the key to success. All data flows through the field staff: survey respondents provide honest and complete responses to field staff whom they trust and with whom they feel comfortable. Locally hired field staff should grasp the technical skills required for efficient data collection, as well as the art of effectively engaging with community members. As the local team lead, the survey manager must master project and personnel management, lead field staff through project hurdles, and be accountable for the team’s productivity.

4. Monitor incoming data quality to avoid post-collecting surprises. Review of incoming data should start early in the data collection phase. Identifying data quality issues, such as missing data or potential outliers, allows the survey manager to train or counsel field staff before additional errors pile up.