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AHS: Housing Affordability Data System

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AHS

I am very pleased to announce the release of the Housing
Affordability Data System (HADS), downloadable from the HUD
USER web site at https://www.huduser.gov/datasets/hads/hads.html .

The HADS is a set of files derived from the 1985-2003
national American Housing Survey (AHS) and the 2002 and 2004
Metro AHS. This system categorizes housing units by
affordability and households by income, with respect to the
Adjusted Median Income, Fair Market Rent (FMR), and poverty
income. It also includes housing cost burden for owner and
renter households. Note that the affordability classification
covers owned, rented, and vacant units. These files have been
the basis for HUD's worst case needs tables since 2001. The
data files were derived from AHS public use files and the
published income limits and FMRs. Thus, they contain no
proprietary or confidential information. We are providing
these files give the community of housing analysts the
opportunity to use a consistent set of affordability measures.

The web page provides the datasets in SAS and ASCII formats.
They include the AHS CONTROL variable (CONTROL and SMSA for
the metro files) so that users can link them to the regular
AHS files.

I recommend that you begin by downloading the documentation
file (PDF), which explains the contents of the datasets. The
web site also includes a zip archive containing the SAS code
that was used to generate the datasets, so that you can see
exactly how each new variable was computed.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david_a._vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-708-1060 ext. 5890