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Just Released: Planning to Meet Local Housing Needs

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Today's Consolidated Plan (ConPlan) requirements reflect a multiplicity of HUD objectives, including planning, grants application, and management reporting. These requirements have evolved rapidly over the course of the 1990s, posing new challenges for local jurisdictions and HUD field offices as they try to understand and satisfy new guidelines and expectations.

In order to increase understanding of how communities address these challenges, HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research recently released a study entitled “Planning to Meet Local Housing Needs: The Role of HUD's Consolidated Planning Requirements in the 1990s”.

The report details how six jurisdictions with very diverse housing markets undertook housing needs analysis and priority and strategy development for housing plans. Researchers conducted site visits and collected secondary data from participating jurisdictions in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and San Francisco. Cross-site analyses synthesized findings from the individual study sites to describe the range of planning approaches to housing needs analysis and planning, and to assess the impacts of these planning requirements on the allocation of federal funds.

The analysis concluded that HUD's requirements are being responsibly implemented by both city and suburban jurisdictions. All studied jurisdictions met the minimum requirements established by HUD for the ConPlan process, and many went beyond the minimum. However, the process presented challenges that limit the extent to which HUD's fundamental goals could be achieved.

The report recommends ways in which HUD could clarify the process and provide better support to jurisdictions to make the local ConPlans more meaningful and effective. Specifically, the ConPlan process could be strengthened in four ways:
1. Address the problem of outdated census information.
2. Provide explicit guidance that priorities and strategies should reflect all federal, state, and local resources, and encourage jurisdictions to develop their priorities for the HUD block funds as part of these larger strategies.
3. Require Public Housing Authorities to actively participate in the local planning process.
4. Design activity reports that align priorities with strategies.

According to the report, these recommendations do not necessarily require either statutory or regulatory changes. Instead, they could be implemented through a combination of clear instructions and consistent guidance, provided with ample notice. The findings in this study will provide HUD with invaluable information as it works to make the ConPlan easier to prepare and more effective in guiding program implementation.

“Planning to Meet Local Housing Needs: The Role of HUD's Consolidated Planning Requirements in the 1990s” is available at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/hsgfin/local_housing_needs.html.

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