Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Housing Measurement Matters: Examining, Constructing, and Testing New Housing Security Measures

(Housing and Community Development)

This panel explores measurement of housing security and neighborhood opportunity. Data documenting the trends and status of the residential settings of low-income households tend to be limited and incomplete. For example, there is no clear consensus on how to assess housing quality, no single index of housing security exists, self-reports of housing assistance receipt are unreliable, and  there is more debate than agreement on what constitutes an opportunity neighborhood.

The current housing affordability crisis and heightened interest in spatial inequality motivates this panel’s fresh look at measuring key aspects of where low-income households live. Our goal is to provide researchers, policymakers and practitioners with new insights into determining the scale and dynamics of housing and neighborhood problems, the effectiveness of housing assistance programs, and the impacts of housing on health, education, economic, and or other outcomes. Four diverse papers examine different aspects of housing security measurement, including constructing new measures of housing quality, exploring opportunities to develop a standard housing instability measure, examining the validity of housing assistance indicators in health survey data, and documenting U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development efforts to develop measures that communities can use to identify neighborhoods of opportunity and further fair housing goals.