AHS: Streamlining the American Housing Survey

From: American Housing Survey (AHS) ListServ <ahs@huduser.gov>

A new report, “Streamlining the American Housing Survey,” is available for download on the HUD USER web site, https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahs.html#supplements .
Since 1973, the HUD and the Census Bureau have teamed to produce the American Housing Survey (AHS).  The recently released 2007 AHS is the 22^nd report on the characteristics and condition of the national housing stock; on the costs of housing, including the financing of owner-occupied housing; and on the households who occupy the stock.  Data from the AHS allow researchers and policy analysts, both inside and outside the government, to document housing problems and to evaluate the operation of the housing market and of policies designed to improve housing.
The national AHS collects information from over 50,000 households every two years using an instrument that often takes over an hour to administer.  The public data files contain thousands of fields.  The size of the sample and the length of the questionnaire make the AHS an expensive survey.  The length of the questionnaire and the AHS’s longitudinal design—the same housing units are surveyed every two years—impose significant burdens on respondents.  As the AHS’s sponsor, HUD feels obligated to ensure that the information produced justifies the costs and burdens.  
For this reason, HUD requested Econometrica, Inc., to assess the analytical usefulness of the AHS’s content.  Specifically, HUD asked the authors to:
Examine the AHS instrument and data set to identify data elements that have some or all of these characteristics:
·        They have very little variation in value, either cross-sectionally or longitudinally.
·        They exhibit unreasonable year-to-year changes for the same household or housing unit.
·        They are used by few researchers, and those uses are not of notable scientific or policy importance.
The goal is to streamline the AHS “by eliminating or modifying content that is currently of marginal usefulness.”  Streamlining would reduce the cost to the government and, more important, would lessen the burden imposed on the public.  Streamlining also could create opportunities to add new and more policy-important content to the AHS.
The contractor’s recommendations fall into three classes.  First, they identify a number of variables that HUD and the Census Bureau should consider eliminating from the AHS.  Second, they identify two groups of variables—those associated with the financing of owner-occupied housing and with the identification of assisted housing—that definitely merit the cost and burden of collecting the information, but that also have well-recognized problems that HUD and the Census Bureau need to solve. Third, they discuss variables related to the use and costs of utilities, a group that may need further improvement and perhaps some trimming.
 
Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-402-5890

I disclaim any disclaimers.