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RI

Housing

Alicia Mies

Brandon Huang

Cynthia Lu

Ruth Bamuwamye

Ecosystem

Feedback: 12/14

Low and Moderate Income Housing Chart - get your hands on this document

State’s Consolidated Housing Plan -- Chapter on the Institutional Across the State

Less for institutional partners -- missing out on a resource tool for people, policy-makers

→ the more we talk about how complicated the process is, the more leeway we give policy makers to claim ignorance

User-friendly, no guidance

Policy Analyst: more information on the further specifications for minority populations: immigrants, LGBTQ youth → how to champion under-represented groups

→ Adding a population’s served

Frustration: Council of Churches

Religious groups are very committed to a mission/social justice piece, but are often disconnect

Open the lines of communication

Narration, Roadmap (Annette, Tom Long)

Front-End question → who is taking ownership, questions about state involvement, office of housing and community development, and rhode island resource commision

The State option of taking ownership, given re-election and the eventual ceding the

Looking into meeting with Brenda

Looking into collaboration with HomesRI with HOI

RISD

United Way - 211, relative to services and housing

Work with Annette on disaggregation and direction

Christina Amadeo

Networks could help communicate with their members.

Three Discrete Use Cases: will the front end tool

People looking for housing
People working in organizations/instutions
Demysitfication for policymakers and legislators

Useful Primary Sources:

Low and Moderate Income Housing Chart

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Refine the housing ecosystem map...

Our Task

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Guiding Questions

What does the housing ecosystem in Rhode Island look like? How do institutions like non-profits, community development corporations, courts, private sector real estate entities, public housing authorities, city and state committees, etc. interact with one another in order to develop and manage affordable housing?
What is the best way to organize and visualize information to convey what the housing ecosystem in RI looks like? How do we best categorize housing entities?
How do we make our visualizations most helpful to a variety of stakeholders, including non-profit organizers, legislators and community partners?

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Process

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Process/Challenges

Collection

No centralized databases
Obscured process

Organization of Data

Format
Categorizations/descriptors

User Optimization

Visualization
Understanding the users of the information (shareholders/actors)

GOAL: Creating a way for community organizations to quickly access basic info/understand the RI housing ecosystem

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Spreadsheet

RUTH - Talk about:

Explain what the spreadsheet is

How we chose the categories

What can we do with the spreadsheet -- filtering, in what different situations different people can use it?

takeaways (alicia):

Surprised at how many organizations there were; how many organizations that are devoted to affordable housing delivery

We found that the affordable housing ecosystem is pretty robust
We found lots of developments, over 400, that provide affordable living. Initially, we thought this would be a lot less.

It seemed like resources may be spread more thin over a greater number of actors; a lot of these organizations are very small (some orgs provided one subsidized house)
Most organizations did a number of things -- rarely did big organizations have one service (like housing delivery) they usually dabbled in a bunch of different services
We had to make a new category for religious organizations
Good way to give credit where credit is due; easy to make blanket statements about the state of affordable housing in RI but there are a lot of organizations that seemingly are doing good things
Not surprised to find out that the hotspots were Providence, South Bay, places where people lived and worked. Surprised to find that there weren’t many resources for people in Pawtucket
Based on This means you lose some of the information you worked so hard to collect. Keep investigating a mechanism for being able to fully expand organizations by services provided. For instance, for a project I am doing, I would like to see those that provide homeownership counseling mapped by service areas.

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Takeaways

172 housing organizations; 448 subsidized affordable housing developments; 32 policies and programs
Housing ecosystem seems extensive
Good way to give credit where credit is due
Resources potentially spread thin?
Many organizations did many things
Religious organizations merited their own category
Providence, South Bay are hotspots; Pawtucket seems unique
No multiple categorizations: losing information? New mechanism?

takeaways (alicia):

Surprised at how many organizations there were; how many organizations that are devoted to affordable housing delivery

We found that the affordable housing ecosystem is pretty robust
We found lots of developments, over 400, that provide affordable living. Initially, we thought this would be a lot less.

It seemed like resources may be spread more thin over a greater number of actors; a lot of these organizations are very small (some orgs provided one subsidized house)
Most organizations did a number of things -- rarely did big organizations have one service (like housing delivery) they usually dabbled in a bunch of different services
We had to make a new category for religious organizations
Good way to give credit where credit is due; easy to make blanket statements about the state of affordable housing in RI but there are a lot of organizations that seemingly are doing good things
Not surprised to find out that the hotspots were Providence, South Bay, places where people lived and worked. Surprised to find that there weren’t many resources for people in Pawtucket
Based on This means you lose some of the information you worked so hard to collect. Keep investigating a mechanism for being able to fully expand organizations by services provided. For instance, for a project I am doing, I would like to see those that provide homeownership counseling mapped by service areas.

Our goal was to create an easy way

Collection

Hard to find all of the information that we wanted
Who to include in our list - organizations, developments, even a professor
Hard to find out interaction and processes,
Hard to find out info such as funding sources

Organization

Once we had the info we wanted to organize it into different cateogries
Hard to know what the cateogries are that people want
Some started to overlap, not good

User Optimization

Making the excel easy to use/understand (descriptors and filter vews
Getting feedbak from possible users of this project, hard to get everyone in one plae
Everyone has different views
Thinking about what kinds of visualizations we wanted or needed to make

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Visualizations

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Booklet

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Future Work

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Next Steps

Further research

Adding more information
Existing resources
Diving in identities/specific communities

Refining the spreadsheet

Ease of additions and corrections

In depth analysis and takeaways

Evaluating the effectiveness of the system
Transformations
Identifying relationships and patterns
Overlaps or gaps in the system
More comprehensive sources of funding

Involving more stakeholders

Community partners
Government agencies
Maintain accuracy, vetting process
Question of ownership

Front-end platform

Interactive visual component