Building Support for Affordable Housing

Posted by National Housing Conference on July 21, 2014

Building Support for Affordable Housing

This report, from the Center for Housing Policy, reviews 35 studies of affordable housing communications and public opinion and offers messaging strategies for building greater support for housing affordability.

This brief is designed to provide affordable housing advocates and practitioners with information on the lessons learned from research about how to effectively communicate about affordable housing with the public and policymakers. Drawing on 35 research studies related to affordable housing communications, the paper summarizes key findings about public opinion, messages, and language and provides suggestions for further research that could add to our understanding of how to communicate effectively about housing affordability. The studies reviewed fall into two categories: public opinion research that adds to our understanding of how respondents feel about affordable housing and the people who live in it; and language and messaging research that describes how respondents react to specific terms and ideas. The conclusions we draw from the literature are listed below. Each of these conclusions is described in more detail in the body of the paper, followed by a brief discussion of more tentative findings and areas in need of further research.

http://www.nhc.org/media/files/2013_10_CommsLitReview.pdf