Local Assessment: How Housing Favorable is Your Community?
NAHB’s State and Local team developed the Housing Favorability Assessment to help local associations foster a favorable, pro-housing environment within their city or county. The assessment consists of a series of questions related to local residential building policies and regulations, ranging from permits to design standards.
Why Should I take the Assessment?
When it comes down to it, local regulations and unofficial policies that have become “standard practice” play an outsized role in determining how challenging it is to build in a community. Once you complete the assessment, your association can use it as an advocacy tool, informative resource or a roadmap to track the progress of your advocacy initiatives.
Assessment Guidelines
The assessment can be completed by an executive officer, member or together with your association’s government affairs committee. If your association’s territory covers multiple cities or counties, you can submit more than one assessment. To get the most accurate assessment, please make sure each survey reflects only ONE city or county at a time.
Determine if your city or county has a favorable housing environment
Post-Survey Analysis
The State and Local Team will follow up with the executive officer about the results. Your association may choose to use the results as an information resource, as an advocacy tool or internal tracker.
Use the score for the communities in your region to initiate constructive conversations with policy makers and practitioners.
Take Action:
- Have your government affairs committee or government affairs-focused staff complete the assessment for communities of interest. These can be areas with negative policies, areas that are supportive of growth or areas you would like to compare.
- In meetings with elected officials and city or county staff, use the scores as a tool to demonstrate the needs of your membership. Use the scores to:
- Demonstrate the tangible difference between a favorable and unfavorable community.
- Emphasize the difference in favorability on a certain topic between two communities with different policies.
- Show communities that express a desire to be pro-housing where their policies are falling short.
- Support and encourage leaders and staff who are creating housing favorable environments
Track your HBA’s progress in creating a housing friendly environment.
Take Action:
- Have your HBA leadership complete the survey and review the results together.
- With your membership, identify a few priority topics to work on over the next year. At the end of your goal period, have those same members take the survey again, and assess your achievements.
- If you are working toward a specific policy goal, have your leadership take the assessment before and after implementation of the policy to assess its effectiveness.
Provide a guide for members that shows where their colleagues prefer to build based upon a survey of how effective your local cities and counties are with supporting land development and housing production.
Take Action:
- Use your BIA/HBA Executive Committee, Board of Directors or Governmental Affairs Committee to conduct the survey annually. This will enable you to set a benchmark and avoid one-off assessments that can skew results.
- Collect the average scores and split communities into tiers based on their scores. Use NAHB’s scoring system of Favorable, Somewhat Favorable and Needs Improvement, or create your own that best fits your needs.
- Optional: Highlight the “why’s,” including the highest and lowest scores for each community. What makes each one stand out? Do members have experiences that bolster these scores?
- Share a ranking or color-coded map with your members to encourage discussion about the ranking's accuracy and to develop a consensus for further action by your BIA/HBA.
- Collect the average scores and split communities into tiers based on their scores. Use NAHB’s scoring system of Favorable, Somewhat Favorable and Needs Improvement, or create your own that best fits your needs.
