By Justin Godard, NLIHC housing advocacy organizer
September is NLIHC Membership Month, and this week we’re highlighting the ways our members support the development of invaluable data and tools useful to those fighting for more affordable housing. Without accurate data, making the case for investing in low income housing resources would be impossible. NLIHC serves this need by continually researching, developing, and distributing data and tools which accurately describe housing needs. One such tool is the National Housing Preservation Database (NHPD).
Created and maintained in partnership with the Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation (PAHRC), the NHPD is an address-level inventory of all federally assisted rental housing in the United States. The benefit of such a tool is that it allows advocates to get a comprehensive understanding of the affordable housing stock in a community. It also allows users interested in perserving local affordable housing to get a clear understanding of which properties might be at risk of loss from the affordable housing stock.
Resources such as the NHPD are only possible through the support of our NLIHC Members! Join today!
The NHPD is utilized by a wide range of stakeholders, including practitioners, public officials, advocates, and researchers. It has been used for developing voter-engagement tools for assisted housing tenants, identifying expiring Section 8 properties where tenants need to be organized to advocate for preserving their affordability, providing data for peer-reviewed journal articles about preservation, and many other purposes. The NHPD is also an important tool for NLIHC’s own research efforts.
Data and resources such as the NHPD are made possible through the contributions of our members. Consider supporting this work and join us!
Note: Nonprofits can sign up to use the NHPD for free; learn more at: https://preservationdatabase.org/
Organizations can also support the NHPD directly at: https://bit.ly/2NQTeh9
This blog is part of a series of blogs highlighting NLIHC member-driven advocacy successes for Membership Month. Find out more about Membership Month at: https://bit.ly/2f16bCh
On the Home Front 