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This week, California’s state housing agencies announced updates to the mapping tools they use to address residential segregation and advance affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) objectives in their funding programs and policies.
These updates include the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) releasing a new Neighborhood Change Map, which identifies low- and moderate-income communities of color that have undergone substantial racial/ethnic and economic changes. This map signals that the state is seeking to advance AFFH objectives not only in higher resource areas but in other neighborhood contexts – and more broadly, that it is embracing a both/and approach to AFFH that includes both mobility- and place-based strategies that we describe in our 2021 policy brief.
HCD and the Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC) also jointly released a revamped Opportunity Map, which identifies neighborhoods whose characteristics are associated with upward mobility and other critical outcomes – particularly for children – as well as high-poverty and racially segregated areas.
Public comments for both maps are due on November 17.
Directions for submitting comments are:
HERE for the Neighborhood Change Map (under “Opportunity Framework”)
HERE for the Opportunity Map
There you will also find the HCD and TCAC statements describing the rationale behind the proposed maps, links to the mapping tools, methodology documentation, and answers to frequently asked questions.
What is the significance of this map update?
The Neighborhood Change Map represents a meaningful evolution in the state agencies’ approaches to advancing AFFH objectives. HCD oversaw the creation of this mapping tool after concluding, based on a review of existing literature, that low- and moderate-income communities of color that have experienced a substantial increase in high-income white households have distinct AFFH implications. Specifically, these neighborhoods are important places to target interventions that address AFFH-related challenges (such as displacement, exclusion, and contributions to new patterns of segregation and unequal access to opportunity) as well as advance AFFH objectives (such as promoting integration and access to opportunity, and addressing disproportionate housing need). These neighborhoods are typically categorized as Moderate Resource or Low Resource in the Opportunity Map.
HCD plans to use the Neighborhood Change Map in its policies and programs as a complement to the approach of increasing access to higher resource neighborhoods for low-income families via policies that reference the Opportunity Map, along with other measures to define and support comprehensive revitalization strategies in lower resource communities; other state housing agencies are considering similar approaches. The totality of these changes brings California’s state agencies closer to embracing the holistic approach to advancing AFFH objectives in multiple neighborhood contexts.
The revamped Opportunity Map and new Neighborhood Change Map also demonstrate an emphasis on transparency in the agencies’ assessments of neighborhoods in mapping tools. In contrast with the index-based approach used in prior versions of the Opportunity Map – which some have found difficult to understand – the new maps use a “threshold-based” approach chosen for its simplicity. This approach categorizes neighborhoods based on how many of their indicator values are above regional thresholds. In the online interface for the maps, users can click on a neighborhood and see its underlying indicator values and relevant benchmarks that lead to the neighborhood’s categorization for each mapping layer, as shown below.
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