Hanuman agrees that it is critical to tap into community perspectives, especially through obtaining up-to-date data from community groups. “The best practice that our community advocates engaged in was taking information from the ground and injecting that into the process. The data is the key piece … that informs everything else. Having the most complete dataset in terms of housing need and particularly different races, ethnicities, disabilities — all of these are fair housing considerations. If we don’t have accurate data to begin with then we can’t begin to solve that problem.”
She adds that community groups play critical roles in ensuring that this data is truthful and that the full story behind community housing decisions and perspectives is being told. “The data needs to be ‘ground-truthed’ by community groups,” Hanuman emphasizes. “Trends on the ground that are happening may or may not be reflected in the most recent academic report. [For example], you can look at things like eviction records in courthouses. You can talk to legal services groups that are representing tenants who are getting evicted. You can talk to non-profit affordable developers that are trying to build affordable housing that may look like the zoning allows it, but politics or dollars are getting in the way rather than the technical rule of law.”
Getting this on-the-ground data is critical for understanding, and then effectively addressing, the real barriers to affordable housing access. “These things can get very nuanced and very complex — and the stories need to be told in order for the problem to begin to be solved,” Hanuman notes. “So that’s a huge role for community groups, is ‘ground-truthing’ to really understand what is the origin of our housing crisis right now. And only then will we have a chance at coming up with a true, inclusive fair housing solution.”