Conclusion: Housing Data Infrastructure Is a Long-Term Political Commitment

The United States is in the midst of a housing affordability and supply crisis, prolonged and exacerbated by our fragmented, incomplete, and often inaccessible data landscape that is not well-suited to tracking housing over time. As a result, policymakers, practitioners, and housing leaders are often forced to make consequential decisions about affordability, supply, preservation, homeownership, and housing stability without the information needed to understand local conditions, evaluate interventions, or target resources effectively. 

Addressing this challenge will require more than a one-time investment or small-scale pilots. Building a robust housing data system is a long-term political commitment that requires sustained leadership, governance, and coordination by Congress, federal agencies, states, local governments, researchers, and housing practitioners. This paper puts forward the following plans:  

• Establish a National Housing Data Authority. Over the long term (2-4 years), the United States should create a federal or quasi-federal entity—a National Housing Data Authority (NHDA)—with a clear mandate to build, maintain, and strengthen the data infrastructure necessary to coordinate decision-making across the housing system. The NHDA will provide the connective infrastructure, institutional capacity, and sustained resources to make housing data more interoperable, accessible, consistent, and useful through a National Housing Data Exchange, while also supporting continuous improvements in the quality and coverage through a Housing Data Action Lab, and building capacity for state and local data through a State and Local Housing Data Hub. 
• Conduct a data discovery and action plan for improving rental market data. Over the short term (1 year), there should be a public, private or philanthropically-supported initiative to improve rental-market data, an area where nonexistent, proprietary, or low-quality data prevent us from adequately addressing the housing crisis. It should convene the relevant stakeholders and conduct a rental market data discovery that maps existing data sources, identifies missing or low-quality data, and assesses feasible pathways for improving rental data, and at the same time, create momentum and clarity to the functions of an NHDA.  

For too long, housing actors have been making housing decisions based on what is measured rather than what matters most. But the United States has a long history of creating data infrastructure in policy domains like labor, education, and justice that are of national importance, and where fragmented data systems hinder effective decision-making. At a time when housing costs and quality are straining households across the country, we can no longer afford to treat housing data as anything but critical, and a National Housing Data Authority is a pathway to do that.