Using Data to Break Up the NOAH Monolith

As cities across the country seek to address rental housing affordability challenges, it has become increasingly clear that solutions to this crisis will not only rely on growing the pool of subsidized affordable rental units, but also require strategies that support the preservation of unsubsidized, lower-cost rental housing (often called naturally occurring affordable housing, or NOAH). These lower-cost units do not receive a direct public subsidy but are affordable due to factors such as building age and conditions, ownership type, and neighborhood market context. Lower-income rental households largely rely on these units when seeking affordable housing compared to subsidized units. Despite their importance to the affordable housing landscape, these lower-cost rentals are vulnerable to rising operating costs, deteriorating property conditions, and changing market characteristics, and research has shown that the loss of lower-cost rental housing is a driving factor affecting rental markets across the country.

In Chicago, the Institute for Housing Studies (IHS) and the Preservation Compact have been using data to document factors driving growing rental housing affordable housing pressures in neighborhoods with different market conditions across the city and convening local stakeholders to develop strategies to address these challenges.

Building on this experience, IHS and the Preservation Compact recently collaborated on a project to inform the development of local and national policies supporting the preservation of unsubsidized, lower-cost rental housing. The goals of this project were to 1) develop a unique data analysis that categorizes submarkets in a set of large US cities into NOAH peer groups based on the characteristics of their rental stock, rental housing demand, and rental affordability conditions; 2) use these typologies to engage and convene stakeholders from cities representing similar and different NOAH market contexts to learn from their successes and challenges; and 3) create a central resource guide and repository of NOAH preservation strategies that documents how different strategies interact with local market dynamics in cities across the country.