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Data and Methods
from Reimagining HPHA Series: Public Housing Authorities and the Affordable Housing Crisis
by Brian Strawn
The primary methodology for this report is an analysis of the development activities of a random sample of 40 Public Housing Authorities. Using public data provided by the Department of Urban Development’s Policy Development and Research Division, we constructed three strata of PHAs based on the number of subsidized units under their authority (a commonly used proxy for agency size). We selected 10 PHAs with between 500 and 3500 units (“small”), 20 with between 3501 and 6500 units (“medium”), and 10 with more than 6501 (“large”). We excluded PHAs with fewer than 500 units because those agencies generally lack the staffing capacity to work beyond traditional housing programs. Our oversample of medium PHAs was designed to collect data most relevant to the Hawai‘i case.
As shown on the map below, our sampling procedure produced a wide geographical spread, meaning that our findings cover a wide range of local policy contexts and housing markets.
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The full list of PHAs in our sample is shown in Appendix A.
Red = Small Blue = Medium Green = Large
Once we selected our sample, we carefully analyzed each PHA in terms of its activities developing affordable housing either directly or with local partners. We collected online information related to each PHA, identified properties in each jurisdiction from the National Housing Preservation Database, and conducted a series of phone interviews to help understand processes in more depth.
While we endeavored to identify the full census of development work undertaken by each PHA, it is important to note that it’s is far more likely that a PHA would have undertaken a project on which we could find no information than we could have information on an erroneous property. Thus estimates throughout represent lower bounds to the development activity undertaken by PHAs and point estimates may be lower than reality. This is similarly true in our attempt to identify all funding sources that went into development of particular properties.
* Source: HUD Picture of Subsidized Households, 2018
