Housing, Contexts, and the Well-Being of Children and Youth
Volume 16 Number 1
Editors
Mark D. Shroder
Michelle P. Matuga
Measuring Housing Affordability
Paul Joice
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the official positions or policies of the Office of Policy Development and Research, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or the U.S. government.
Data Shop
Data Shop, a department of Cityscape, presents short articles or notes on the uses of
data in housing and urban research. Through this department, the Office of Policy Development and Research introduces readers to new and overlooked data sources and to
improved techniques in using well-known data. The emphasis is on sources and methods
that analysts can use in their own work. Researchers often run into knotty data problems
involving data interpretation or manipulation that must be solved before a project can
proceed, but they seldom get to focus in detail on the solutions to such problems. If you
have an idea for an applied, data-centric note of no more than 3,000 words, please send
a one-paragraph abstract to david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov for consideration.
This article discusses how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) measures housing affordability and presents an analysis of custom tabulations of the 2006–2010 American Community Survey (ACS), known as the "Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) data." The CHAS data combine ACS microdata with HUD-adjusted Median Family Incomes to create estimates of the number of households that would qualify for HUD assistance. Using these data, the author estimates the number of rental units and ownership units that would be affordable to prototypical households at specified income levels.
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