2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

66 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Since its inception in 1997, HousingLink has served as Minnesota’s
main hub for information and data related to affordable housing. It
was formed as a result of a 1995 lawsuit and tasked with becoming the
centralized resource for Section 8 voucher holders and people living in
public housing to better understand their housing options. 12 To meet
this need, HousingLink, over the past 16 years, has tracked affordable
rental housing across the state (the majority of which is in the Twin Cities
region) and makes the information available through two interactive,
web-based mapping applications called hList and Streams.
Through hList, HousingLink tracks the availability of public and
private affordable-housing units across the state and publishes actual
rental listings where there is a vacancy or an open waiting list. To do this,
HousingLink offers private-market landlords and other housing providers
the opportunity to list, for free, their properties directly on the hList
web application. It also regularly draws additional listings from a variety
of public sources, both print and online. This comprehensive approach
provides visibility to more than 15,000 listings every quarter.
Streams, HousingLink’s online database of rent-subsidized properties,
provides detailed information about each dwelling’s location, government
funding source (or “stream”), affordability commitments, and
renter income qualifications. Although this site is available to the public,
it is intended primarily for researchers, advocates, and policymakers—
anyone interested in the supply of subsidized housing. HousingLink
gathers this information by working with a range of entities that provide
housing subsidies, including federal agencies like the US Department
of Housing and Urban Development and the US Department of
Agriculture, state and local entities like Minnesota Housing (the state’s
affordable-housing agency), Minneapolis’s Community Planning and
Economic Development Department, and a variety of other local government
and nonprofit funders.
As a testament to their value, each month more than 30,000 people
visit the hList and Streams web applications. Although HousingLink
itself doesn’t participate in community development projects (it serves
only as a data clearinghouse and resource center), many people and
institutions use the information available on its website to inform their
projects. For instance, the Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, a
supportive-housing organization with multiple shelters and housing
developments throughout the Twin Cities, uses HousingLink’s Streams
application to gather intelligence on potential future housing projects.