Workshop: Low Income Housing, Single Mothers, and GIS

Bibliography of Low-Income Housing Data (annotated, with a focus on Texas)
Entire Workshop Materials (Full CD)

Held a workshop last week focusing on low-income housing. The purpose of the workshop was to increase awareness of the amazing datasets (GIS and tabular) available on the HUD User website, as well as numerous others. As is evident by perusing through the annotated bibliography, I compiled a fairly comprehensive list of resources. Data source agencies include HUD, Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs, United Way, Census 2000/1990, Texas State Data Center, and AGS demographics.

The workshop was focused around a fictitious foundation offering grants to developers of low-income multifamily housing units targeting single mothers. Using single mothers as the target population helped to increase the attraction of the workshop and gave us a chance to play around with some interesting and relevant demographic data. We focused on the 6-county area of Collin, Denton, Tarrant, Dallas, Johnson, and Ellis.

Had 16 folks show up, which is pretty phenomenal considering the scholarly and non-popular focus of the workshop. A rep from the Dallas office of the Fannie Mae Foundation (not a fictitious foundation) attended and seemed to have a good time. A whole group of social work students attended, as well as real estate (which was a pleasant surprise). Also was a handful of social work faculty and a nursing professor as well.

A CD image of the workshop materials can be downloaded here. ArcGIS 9 is required.