Celebrating PD&R’s Accomplishments in Driving HUD’s Mission Forward

Celebrating PD&R’s Accomplishments in Driving HUD’s Mission Forward

By Solomon Greene, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Policy Development and Research

Happy new year, and welcome to the first PD&R Edge issue of 2025! I find the holiday season to be a good time for reflection, celebration, and gratitude. Before spending time with friends and loved ones over the holidays, I reflected on PD&R's tremendous accomplishments over the past 2 years while reviewing a draft of the upcoming PD&R biennial report for fiscal years (FYs) 2023 and 2024.

PD&R's biennial reports share PD&R's most notable and transformative recent accomplishments. They are a great way for researchers, policymakers, and the public to learn about PD&R and its role in disseminating reliable information on housing and community development needs and market conditions, producing rigorous research and filling knowledge gaps, sparking and scaling innovation, managing and leveraging HUD's data assets, building capacity in the field, and providing evidence-based insights and expert policy advice to the HUD Secretary and HUD program offices. I wanted to kick off the new year by sharing what I learned about how PD&R's recent accomplishments have propelled HUD's mission forward and celebrating the incredible PD&R team that made these accomplishments possible.

I have been honored to serve as the principal deputy assistant secretary for policy development and research at HUD during the period covered in the upcoming report. Soon after assuming this role in July 2022, I held "deep dive" meetings with each of the 19 divisions that then composed HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R), which has since grown and reorganized to encompass 23 divisions. Those meetings helped me to identify, develop, and share four broad priorities for PD&R during my tenure leading the office:

1. Expand HUD's role in closing the housing supply gap while fortifying all communities against the effects of climate change.
2. Build HUD's capacity to harness technology and innovation to advance research and policy development and improve outcomes for the people and communities we serve.
3. Center people and communities in PD&R's research, including by elevating and applying insights from people with lived experience and advancing equity and inclusion in PD&R's work.
4. Improve PD&R's data support for HUD program operations; expand access to and use of PD&R's research, data, and knowledge resources; and leverage research and evidence-based insights from the field to help inform policy and program development at HUD.

These priorities were initially informed by interviews I conducted before joining PD&R, including with previous assistant secretaries and other PD&R leaders, as well as housing and community development scholars and researchers from across the country. But most importantly, these priorities were shaped and refined by the insights I gained from the more than 150 researchers, policy experts, innovators, capacity builders, and managers — all dedicated public servants — that I talked to during our deep dive meetings (the PD&R team has since grown to more than 200).

As I reviewed the draft of the upcoming PD&R biennial report, I was struck by how much progress we've made in each of these priority areas in just 2 years. This is a testament to the skill of the PD&R team and the strength of the partnerships that they have forged throughout HUD and in the broader field in the years and decades that preceded me. In this Leadership Message, I am delighted to share with you some of the accomplishments I am most proud of, organized around these four priority areas.

1. Expand HUD's role in closing the housing supply gap while fortifying all communities against the effects of climate change.

This priority addresses two stark realities in the United States. First, we know that the nation faces a growing shortage of housing that is affordable to low- and moderate-income renters. We also know that, because of funding limitations, most low-income renters who qualify for federal housing assistance do not receive it. Many of these unassisted renters also face worst-case housing needs, meaning that they pay more than one-half of their income for rent, live in severely inadequate conditions, or both. In PD&R's most recent Worst Case Housing Needs Report to Congress, we found that 8.53 million very low-income, unassisted renters had worst case housing needs in 2021, a significant increase over the past several years and the highest level we've seen since the study began in 1989. To meet the needs of these unassisted renters, we need to both expand access to and improve rental assistance programs (such as the Housing Choice Voucher program), while simultaneously increasing the supply of housing generally (including market-rate housing), which can ease pressure on local markets and reduce cost burdens up and down the income ladder.

PD&R has made great strides over the past 2 years in helping HUD and our partners in state and local government increase and improve the nation's housing supply, including our unassisted housing stock. One accomplishment I'm most proud of is the release of more than $4 million in research grants in FY 2024 to support innovation and evidence related to new building technologies and regulatory reforms, including offsite construction, zoning and land use reforms, and office-to-residential conversions, that have the potential to meet the nation's ongoing housing supply challenges. These investments in applied and actionable research complement HUD's investments in the implementation of pro-housing policies and new housing construction, such as the $85 million Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO Housing) grants competition in FY 2024.

To help leverage federal investments that can boost housing supply, PD&R also launched the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Program (TCTA) in FY 2023. This program, funded by HUD and administered by technical assistance providers, helps ensure that local governments consider housing needs as part of their larger infrastructure investment plans while also supporting equitable development in disadvantaged communities. As one example of a success story, TCTA capacity builders helped communities in Syracuse, New York, build strong partnerships that led to a $180 million Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. When completed, this project will reconnect communities that were divided by an interstate highway and improve public infrastructure to support mixed-income housing redevelopment in the area.

PD&R invests not only in research and capacity building to expand housing supply but also in strengthening tenant protections and improving access to resources and services that help renters remain in their homes. For example, in 2021, PD&R launched the Eviction Protection Grant Program, a first-of-its-kind federal program designed to expand the reach of legal services to low-income tenants at risk of eviction. We expanded the program in FY 2023 and FY 2024, providing additional funding and serving more renters. As of March 31, 2024, program grantees have provided legal assistance to more than 35,000 households, representing a rapid scaling up of service to meet tenant needs.

The second pressing challenge this priority addresses is the increasing number of people and communities nationwide devastated by the effects of climate change, particularly extreme weather events and natural disasters. During FY 2023 and FY 2024, there were 156 presidentially declared disasters, up from 111 in the previous 2 fiscal years (FY 2021 and FY 2022). In addition, the United States spends approximately $400 billion annually to heat, cool, light, and power residential and commercial buildings, and HUD spends an average of $6 billion annually rebuilding and repairing damage to properties from natural disasters. We can save households and the federal government money — as well as protect lives and livelihoods — by making our nation's homes more energy efficient and fortifying our communities against the effects of climate change.

PD&R's primary roles related to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency efforts are to improve access to data, fill knowledge gaps, support innovation, and build capacity. In FY 2023 and FY 2024, PD&R invested in or conducted several climate-related studies described more fully in the upcoming biennial report, including research on how climate change affects mortgage default risk, particularly for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and launching an evaluation of HUD's Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, which provides owners of HUD-assisted multifamily housing with capital resources to reduce carbon emissions, make utility efficiency improvements, incorporate renewable energy sources, and make properties more resilient against the effects of natural hazards. PD&R has also supported HUD's efforts to address the rising costs of property insurance for both homeowners and housing providers, a critical challenge facing U.S. housing providers that is driven in large part by increasing climate-related risks.

At the 28th U.N. Climate Conference (COP28) in 2023, HUD announced that it had joined the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which coordinates federal research and investments in understanding the human and natural forces shaping the global environment and their impacts on society. By participating in USGCRP, HUD can guide and contribute to the U.S. government's state-of-the art research and data on global climate change and ensure that it benefits the people and communities that HUD serves. HUD also announced a new memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Energy to partner on domestic efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the building sector and to cut costs for consumers through energy-efficiency improvements.

2. Build HUD's capacity to harness technology and innovation to advance research and policy development and improve outcomes for the people and communities we serve.

Over the past 2 years, with leadership from PD&R, HUD has demonstrated how to leverage technological innovation responsibly and equitably to create more housing access and opportunity for all. At HUD, we research innovative technologies not for their own sake but rather to help us advance our mission and improve outcomes for the people and communities we serve. PD&R supports the responsible uptake of promising new technologies in the housing sector through research, evaluation, and testing, which we've been doing in the building technology space since PD&R's founding more than 50 years ago.

PD&R has published several influential reports over the past 2 years sharing what we've learned about innovative housing technologies — from cross-laminated timber to 3D-printed homes — all of which will be included in the upcoming biennial report. In January 2023, we also published a report creating a research roadmap for HUD and the field to unleash the potential of offsite construction to address our nation's housing supply shortages and affordability and resiliency challenges. The Offsite Construction for Housing: Research Roadmap already has been used to inform our grantmaking, including the more than $4 million in new supply-related research described previously, and it will inform forthcoming reports on international examples that can inspire federal actions as well as case studies on state and local jurisdictions that have assumed leading roles in industrialized housing construction.

In addition to research and publications, PD&R continues to elevate promising new building technologies through HUD's annual Innovative Housing Showcase on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Innovative Housing Showcase gathers experts from the homebuilding, technology, policymaking, and research communities to promote innovative and affordable housing designs and technologies that can increase housing supply, lower the cost of construction, improve energy efficiency and resilience, and reduce housing expenses for all Americans. This year's showcase was our most successful yet, featuring exhibitors from more than 20 states and attracting more than 4,000 visitors. The showcase also featured the first multifamily manufactured homes built under the recently updated HUD Code, demonstrating how fostering innovation and modernizing building codes can help unleash the supply of safe, affordable, and energy-efficient homes and expand choices for homebuyers nationwide. The event also featured associated educational programming in which the nation's leading housing experts discussed housing innovation in all its complexity, from building codes and decarbonization to zoning, land use, and resilience.

Technological innovation is affecting not only how homes are built in the United States but also how renters search for housing, how homebuyers access credit, how builders identify sites and finance new construction, and how communities plan for and meet their housing needs. We addressed these topics in a yearlong public event series featuring roundtable discussions in partnership with Terner Labs.

One of my favorite events in this series was a symposium in Detroit, MI, discussing how technology and innovation can expand access to homeownership, particularly for underserved borrowers. The event highlighted recent changes that FHA made to the TOTAL Mortgage Scorecard with research and analytic support from PD&R. Since October 2022, FHA has allowed lenders to use positive rental history to increase credit access for first-time homebuyers with a demonstrated history of on-time rent payments, which generally are not reflected in credit scores. Over the past 2 years, more than 6,000 endorsements that otherwise would have required manual underwriting were accepted through TOTAL thanks to this policy change, which was informed by a "virtuous cycle" of innovation research and testing, and continuous evaluation and improvement.

PD&R also played an important role in informing HUD's policies and procedures regarding the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) within HUD and in the housing industry. One of the accomplishments I am most proud of is our partnership with HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity to publish new guidance addressing the application of the Fair Housing Act to two potentially problematic uses of AI: in tenant screening and in online advertising of housing opportunities. The guidance documents were based on PD&R's research and stakeholder engagement on these topics, and they executed on commitments HUD made in the landmark Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, which was designed to ensure that the United States leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of AI.

3. Center people and communities in PD&R's research, including by elevating and applying insights from people with lived experience and advancing equity and inclusion in PD&R's work.

PD&R has a long history of incorporating the perspectives of people with lived experience into HUD programs, including through the Learning Agenda process required by the Evidence Act of 2018 (and before that through our research roadmap process). HUD's Evaluation Policy Statement, adopted in 2021, also commits it to prioritize lived expertise in our research and continue to engage HUD-assisted households and other people with lived experience of housing instability and affordability challenges in our efforts to continuously improve our research and deepen our impact. In the 2 years covered in the upcoming report, we made significant strides in operationalizing these commitments. We adopted a policy that ensures that individuals with lived experience are compensated for their contributions to HUD's mission, programs, and research, including when serving as subject-matter experts for PD&R's research publications and policy development activities. In FY 2023, we issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for partnerships between universities and nonprofits to support community-engaged research to address homelessness, which was HUD's first NOFO to explicitly support research that "meaningfully engages the community that is the subject of the research, including community groups and people with lived experience."

Over the past 2 years, PD&R helped deepen HUD's commitment to building equitable and inclusive communities and ensuring that HUD's policies and programs meet the needs of communities that face the greatest barriers to safe, quality, affordable housing, including through contributions to HUD's Equity Action Plan. One of the accomplishments I am most proud of in this priority area is PD&R's support to establish Research Centers of Excellence at nine Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). PD&R's Research Centers of Excellence (COEs) conduct research projects on topics of strategic interest to HUD and produce research that generates evidence-based solutions to housing, community development, economic development, or built environment challenges in underserved communities. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the COEs support evidence-based, data-driven, and community-informed policymaking and program improvements at the local, state, and national levels. In FY 2023 and FY 2024, PD&R announced $10.5 million in COE awards to four HBCUs (North Carolina A&T State University, Texas Southern University, Winston-Salem State University, and Tennessee State University) and $10.5 million in COE awards to four HSIs (Arizona State University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, and University of Texas at Austin).

In FY 2023, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge announced the creation of the first-ever HUD Tribal Intergovernmental Advisory Committee (TIAC). TIAC is charged with facilitating intergovernmental communication between HUD and leaders of federally recognized Tribes regarding HUD programs and recommending policies with Tribal implications to HUD. I have been honored to serve on TIAC since its launch, representing PD&R at each of the four TIAC meetings that have been held to date. Although PD&R has long contributed to HUD's work with Tribes (primarily through research on Tribal housing needs and the development of funding allocation formulas), TIAC has inspired us to reinvigorate our investments in Tribal research and support policy development related to Tribes throughout HUD. As noted in the upcoming report, we are currently supporting an evaluation of the Indian Housing Block Grant, and the next round of funding to support housing and community development research at minority-serving institutions will include support for Tribal Colleges and Universities and Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions. Last year, in our supplement to the HUD Learning Agenda, PD&R also identified additional priority research questions related to Tribes, noting, "Research on unique Indian and Tribal Issues should harness indigenous knowledge in partnership with tribal communities as well as with Indigenous peoples of the U.S. territories, both of whom are underrepresented in HUD research."

PD&R also is responsible for setting policies related to HUD's data collection and management, and we know that how we collect data, whom we collect data from, and how we use data all have implications for equity and inclusion in our research and in HUD programs. Past research shows that LGBTQI+ individuals face discrimination in housing as well as other barriers to accessing affordable rental housing and homeownership. Until recently, however, HUD did not collect data on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), limiting researchers' ability to understand these issues and inform policy to improve the well-being of LGBTQI+ individuals. In FY 2023, PD&R released its SOGI Data Action Plan, making HUD one of the first federal agencies to respond to the Executive Order on Advancing Equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Individuals. Since then, HUD has either completed or made considerable progress toward fulfilling the plan's action items, including updates to data collection, planning, and coordination efforts.

4. Improve PD&R's data support for HUD program operations; expand access to and use of PD&R's research, data, and knowledge resources; and leverage research and evidence-based insights from the field to help inform policy and program development at HUD.

Data and research are at the core of everything we do in PD&R. PD&R provides the data and analytics that advance and support HUD's mission, policies, and programs, from establishing grant formulas to evaluating the impact of proposed rules and regulations on the U.S. economy, people and communities. In the period covered in the upcoming report, we made several important improvements to how we calculate key parameters for HUD programs, including by using better data and refining our methods to respond to advances in technology and a global pandemic that shook our nation's economy and housing markets.

In 2022, we modified our methods of calculating Fair Market Rents (FMRs) to incorporate private-sector data on local housing market conditions to keep up with rapid rent increases and make accessing affordable housing easier for families with housing vouchers. This change helped improve utilization rates in the voucher program, suggesting that the new calculations more accurately reflect current market rents and demonstrating how better data can improve families and communities. We continued this practice to calculate FMRs for FY 2024 and FY 2025.

Property insurance costs also are rising dramatically for all owners, including multifamily owners who rely on HUD funding to provide affordable housing to nearly 2 million Americans each year. In late 2022, PD&R revised our methodology for calculating how contract rents are set in Section 8 project-based rental housing to better account for rising insurance costs among property owners. We've continued to improve this methodology, and recently we announced that we will begin using actual insurance costs reported by multifamily owners in our calculations, which should help ensure that contract rents in HUD's multifamily properties are keeping up with real costs in a rapidly changing marketplace.

PD&R also has been improving the ways in which we share our data, research, and evidence-based insights with policymakers, researchers, practitioners and the public. One way we disseminate information is through our PD&R Quarterly Updates, which gather leading experts and local practitioners to discuss new research and innovative, bottom-up solutions to the nation's most pressing housing and community development challenges. During the 2 years covered in the upcoming report, we hosted six Quarterly Updates on topics ranging from institutional investors in housing to office-to-residential conversions. Participation in these events, which are open to the public both in person at HUD Headquarters and by livestream, has skyrocketed over the past 2 years, reaching a record high of more than 1,800 participants for the 2024 Quarterly Update focused on source of income discrimination. We typically summarize the evidence and what we've learned from each Quarterly event in an article in our online magazine, PD&R Edge.

For more than 30 years, PD&R has been publishing Cityscape, a multidisciplinary scholarly journal that advances the state of knowledge, policy, and practice in the areas of HUD's mission. Over the years, Cityscape has become one of the nation's foremost resources on rigorous scholarship and innovative ideas related to housing and community development. Each issue includes at least one symposium of scholarly papers on a common theme touching on a range of issues. During the 2 years covered in the upcoming report, we published Cityscape issues on such diverse topics as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on housing markets, improvements to the Housing Choice Voucher program over its 50-year history, and local zoning reforms and innovations. For the past 2 years, we have tried something new: inviting scholars who contributed articles to each issue of Cityscape to present their research directly to leaders and program administrators across HUD so that we can engage directly with them and their research. These discussions invariably brought new insights and ideas to the people at HUD who are designing policies and constantly striving to improve our programs with the best available research and evidence.

One other way that we brought evidence-based insights and new ideas into HUD was through the 2-day Next Generation of Housing Policy roundtable in October 2024. We invited leading national scholars to roundtable discussions organized around five topics and motivating questions that are top priorities for the next generation of housing policy: housing supply, rental assistance, homelessness, renter protections, and homeownership. HUD's top leaders facilitated these sessions, and academics and researchers from leading universities and research centers provided key insights. Todd Richardson, PD&R's general deputy assistant secretary, and Elayne Weiss, deputy assistant secretary for policy development, recently shared what we learned from that incredibly rich and productive discussion in a Leadership Message in PD&R Edge.

Learning From Our Past To Build a Better Future

I'll conclude this message where the upcoming biennial report begins: with PD&R's celebration of its 50th anniversary in 2023. I was honored to be able to serve as PD&R's principal deputy assistant secretary as the office celebrated 50 years of innovation, evidence and impact. We celebrated PD&R's history in two ways: first with a yearlong series of articles in PD&R Edge in which we reflected on PD&R's signature research, data, program evaluations, and demonstration projects over the past 50 years and identified key lessons for our work going forward; and second, with a 50th anniversary reunion in September 2023 that brought together the people of PD&R, including 10 former assistant secretaries, more than 60 alumni, and most of our current staff.

We learned a tremendous amount from both celebrations — after all, we're PD&R, and learning is what we do best! At the end of the day, however, the lesson I learned from both the PD&R at 50 series in PD&R Edge and the reunion was the same: people power PD&R and drive our impact in communities. The incredible people who work in PD&R — the researchers, the capacity builders, the innovators, the grant managers, the data managers, and the policy experts — are the public servants who consistently push HUD and the field to improve life in American communities by building evidence to inform and strengthen housing and community development policy. That commitment has been a constant throughout PD&R's long and distinguished history; we've attracted extraordinary and dedicated talent to our ranks, and we've cultivated leaders who continue to champion evidence-based, data-driven, and community-informed policymaking to improve communities and better people's lives, wherever they go next.

While the upcoming biennial report doesn't mention all those people by name, it does showcase their incredible work and contributions, at least over a 2-year period. I hope you have an opportunity to get to know and appreciate those dedicated people as I have had the privilege to do, not only during the 2 years covered in the upcoming biennial report but also throughout my career in housing research and policy development.