Urban Land Magazine
By: Michael Spotts
June 29th, 2020

Attainable housing and income segregation remain major challenges for families and communities.

The ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing has created a Home Attainability Index, designed to support ULI district councils, local municipalities, and members of the development community who are working to address longstanding challenges related to home affordability.

The resources in the index provide a high-level snapshot of the extent to which a region’s housing market offers a range of attainable choices to the local workforce. The information in this index will help identify gaps in home attainability and provide a better context for understanding residential markets. Over time, the index will enable national and regional comparisons to inform decisions about housing production, policy, and financing. The index, which is in the pilot stage, was debuted at the ULI Housing Opportunity Conference held during February in Miami. (Readers should note that these resources were developed and released before the widespread outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, and therefore do not capture housing challenges resulting from the associated economic disruption.)

To develop the index, the ULI Terwilliger Center selected 11 metrics from existing, nationally recognized data sources and providers, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the National Housing Conference (NHC), and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The index metrics fit into five core categories: overall affordability, homeownership attainability, rental attainability, neighborhood opportunity and access, and housing production. In addition, the Terwilliger Center partnered with the NHC to contextualize home attainability data with regional needs for workforce housing.

As part of the suite of index-related resources, the Terwilliger Center released a national summary report,… read the full article here.