The Affordable Rental Housing Benefits Map (chpc.net/benefitsmap) provides policymakers, housing providers, advocates and elected officials with the data and visual tools to communicate the positive impacts of affordable housing in California. The California Housing Partnership is excited to announce the following updates to the Benefits Map as of September 1, 2020:

1 | Map layers. The new 2020 TCAC/HCD Opportunity Map to affirmatively further fair housing, developed with input from the California Housing Partnership, was adopted earlier this year and has now been integrated into the Partnership's Benefits Map. Previous versions of the TCAC/HCD Opportunity Maps looked only at a point in time and did not account for rapid changes in opportunity and resources occurring in some areas. To help TCAC and HCD identify areas that may soon become "High Resource" based on recent trends, the Task Force incorporated a new methodology in 2020 to identify "Moderate Resource (Rapidly Changing)" areas. The 2020 Opportunity Map now also includes smaller geographies of opportunity for rural areas to allow for a finer-grained analysis than in previous versions of the TCAC/HCD Opportunity Map. 

2 | Co-benefits in current dollars. The Benefits Map leverages the best available academic research on the impacts of affordable housing to translate property characteristics-such as number of units, length of affordability restrictions, and location of the property-into quantifiable estimates of social and economic impact, including:

The update converts all dollar values for the social and economic benefits highlighted in the map into inflation-adjusted current dollars.

3 | Property-level data. The Benefits Map pulls property data from the Partnership's Preservation Database, an inventory of federal- and state-subsidized affordable rental properties in California. The update adds 2019 property-level financing and placed-in-service data.

4 | Future updates. The Partnership is currently developing several new features including adding data on state financing programs. The Partnership invites you to help with the development of this next version of the Benefits Map by telling us how you would like to use this resource and suggesting further improvements that will benefit your work in affordable housing.