Celebrating the 1st Anniversary of the Housing Needs Assessment Tool

Empowering Local Housing Strategies

One year ago, PolicyMap announced our partnership with the NYU Furman Center, a joint center of the New York University School of Law and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and the Center’s Housing Solutions Lab.

Together, we created a publicly available Housing Needs Assessment tool (HNAT) that enables policymakers, practitioners and community leaders to build local housing strategies driven by relevant data and insights. The tool can generate housing needs assessments for every US Census jurisdiction, translating data into interactive visualizations.

Over the past year, HNAT has provided key data points necessary for a comprehensive local housing strategy for cities across the country. We’ve helped officials, researchers, businesses leaders and local organizations understand trends, establish baseline measures, and track results over time. And, working closely with the NYU Furman Center, we’ve added new indicators and features, most recently a section focused on racial equity, to advance research and debate on housing, neighborhoods, and urban policy.

Dig Deeper into PolicyMap’s Data-Driven Affordable Housing Resources