Publications on Neighborhood Indicators

The District of Columbia Housing Monitor provides a quarterly look at the Washington, D.C., housing market, tracking home prices, real estate listings, new construction, and affordable housing. This issue's special section provides the most extensive tracking to date of the city's subsidized affordable housing stock, reporting numbers of units by location, program type, ownership, and expiration of affordability restrictions.

This testimony discusses recent data, compiled by NeighborhoodInfo DC, on foreclosures and losses of Section 8 housing units in Washington, D.C. Foreclosures have almost doubled since 2005 and the city has lost close to 2,000 units of federally-subsidized housing since 2000. These developments exacerbate an already serious affordable housing shortage in the nation's capital.

The 14th annual Fact Book is a comprehensive data source for indicators of child well-being in the District of Columbia. Over 50 data indicators are tracked over time. This publication provides a broad perspective on the status of children and youth in the District. We seek to inform and educate our readers about the issues affecting children and their families in the District. We encourage community residents, policy makers, professionals, and others who work with and/or on behalf of children and families to create conditions that foster the optimal health and development of our children.

The data used to craft neighborhood indicators often come from the records of administrative agencies. These are particularly useful for community indicators because they are timelier or can be applied to smaller areas than government surveys. This monograph describes 42 of these data sources. It begins with a brief section on recent developments in neighborhood indicators work, followed by a discussion of some of the challenges of using administrative records data for these purposes. The main body of the monograph is a catalog that describes the sources and gives examples of the types of indicators that can be constructed from each.