The Case For Affordable Housing In Every Community: Introducing the Housing Affordability Report

The United States is experiencing an affordable housing crisis. This crisis stems from a widespread and acute lack of affordable low income, and supportive housing across the United States in all communities - urban, suburban, and rural. The lack of access to affordable, low income and supportive housing disproportionately affects people of color, individuals with disabilities, and people involved in the justice and child welfare systems. 

At the center of the solution, there is the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), a national nonprofit organization on a mission to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people, maximize public resources and build equitable and thriving communities. Working with community decision-makers, policymakers, advocates, developers, and urban planners, they aim to build the case for sufficient affordable housing linked with supportive services in every community across the United States.

To accomplish this work, CSH and mySidewalk collaborated and developed an interactive, accessible data assessment to give national support for advocates of affordable and supportive housing. The CSH Housing Affordability Report seamlessly integrates over 20 data visualizations with the story of housing burden that is all too familiar for millions of households every day. The goal: to develop adequate, affordable housing, as well as low income and supportive housing units in proportion to every communities’ needs. 

Features of the report:

• Assess the affordability of your housing market backed by the experts at the Corporation for Supportive Housing
• Share compelling storytelling to help you build local support for affordable and supportive housing
• Visualize and download housing data for your city, town, county, US congressional district, state senate district, state house district, unified school district, city council district, ZIP code, neighborhood, and more
• Compare data for up to 6 geographies at a time for peer, regional, state, and national comparisons
• Discover what it means to invest in supportive housing in your community alongside the Corporation for Supportive Housing
• Assessments are web-based, mobile optimized, ADA compliant, and WCAG 2.0 accessible
• Access your assessment online, by printing to PDF, embedding on your website, or downloading the underlying data as a .csv, .png, or .geojson file

This assessment is a chance for us to acknowledge that everyone deserves to live in a supportive community with a home they can afford. It’s a space where we learn that renters often earn just a fraction of what homeowners earn, and yet can pay even more for housing. By using this report, you can discover barriers into homeownership for those in your community and begin to break them. 

“We are proud to launch our new Affordable Housing Report within the mySidewalk platform. mySidewalk has made available an enormous quantity of data for analysis. They are a mission-oriented company that works to understand their clients. They have become a reciprocal partner of CHS and helped us meet our goals to create data that accurately defines the problem and achieves more equitable outcomes.” - Kim Keaton, Director of Data and Analytics at CSH  

The CSH Housing Affordability Report is available in Chart, the data visualization and storytelling platform from mySidewalk.

See it for yourself.

See what better community development analytics look like firsthand.