[ Reply ]
From: Michael Hanley
email: mailto:mhanley@wnylc.com
link: http://www.huduser.org/datasets/assthsg/statedata98/index.html
date: 5/19/0 18:48
Date: 12/21/00
Time: 11:22:19 AM
Remote Name: 207.251.188.199
How to find average income for individual Public Housing Developments
Some folks have asked how to get to public housing authority income data in connection with monitoring their local PHA's implementation of the Deconcentration (income mix) requirement.
If you are looking for a data source to find the average income for each of your local public housing authority's developments, but you don't want to deal with downloading files and putting them into databases, here's how to just view the most recent (1998)information on the internet:
1. Go to: http://huduser.org/datasets/assthsg.html (or click on the link at the end of this posting and then skip to Step 3);
2. Click on "A Picture of Subsidized Households -- 1998";
3. Click on your state from the map displayed;
4. Click on "View" on the line "Project, Agency, and State Summaries";
5. To locate your housing authority, use your browser's "Find" tool (or just hit "Ctrl+F") and enter the housing authority's project code number, if you know it. If you don't know the code number, just do a "find" for the name of the city that's in your PHA's title. (E.g., "Buffalo" to get to the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority -- don't use the full name, it may not appear exactly as you'd expect.) That should get you to the PHA you're looking for.
The line you land on will probably have "43" in the first column. Each individual development will then be listed separately starting a line or two below that record. The individual project names or addresses will be in the second column. Each of the individual developments is preceded by a "63" in the first column.
The PHA-wide totals for all of the PHA's public housing are preceded by a "43", If there is a line preceded by "44", that's he Section 8 tenant-based totals ("45" is the mod-rehab totals; "42" is the Indian Public housing code. Also, nearer to the bottom of the database you'll also see records preceded by "66" through "68". Those are the records for each FHA multifamily project. "69" is LIHTC, but that data is very incomplete and only updated to 1994).
6. You will be looking at about fifty data fields across the screen for each development or the averages for the PHA as a whole. The Average Income data is under the heading "Incm" -- about seven fields in from the first field after the names and ID numbers. It will be a number with a decimal to tenths. Just multiply by 1000, e.g., "9.7" would of course be $9700. (The field headings are repeated every 20 records to make them easier to read).
The complete HUD definition for the "Incm" field in their "Detailed Explanation of Varialbles" is as follows:
"Average total household income. This is shown in thousands of dollars per year, with decimal point. This is basically total income before adjustments, expected for the next 12 months, but it does exclude some types of income which HUD regulations do not count at all, such as earnings of minors, and scholarships.
Averages below $1,000 are shown as .00-.99 thousand dollars. Averages below $10,000 are shown as 1.0-9.9 thousand dollars. Higher averages are shown as 10. to 99. thousand dollars."
7. If you are curious about the other field definitions, go back to Step 3 and click on "Detailed Explanation of Variables", which appears BELOW the map of the United States. (You can get there from the link at the bottom of this posting).
8. If you wish to compare the public housing authority's demographics to the 1990 Census data for the census tract in which the development is located, the percent of persons living in poverty and the percent of minorities in the tract are in the seventh and sixth data fields from the FAR end for each development, listed as "PV" and "MN", respectively.
9. Don't forget, there's also a more "user friendly" data source: the MTCS site. The MTCS data is only one month old, but unfortunately, it doesn't make the information available for each individual development. To check it out, go to: http://www.hud.gov/pih/systems/mtcs/rcr.html
THE FOLLOWING LINK WILL TAKE YOU DIRECTLY TO STEP 3 above:
Public Housing Development Info