Raleigh’s Affordable Housing web pages are Unnavigable

Imagine walking into a government building to get one simple form. There are hundreds of doors, but none clearly say what’s inside.

Instead of “Parking Permits” or “Trash Pickup,” the signs say things like “Urban Mobility Services.”

You open one door. It leads to a hallway with three more doors. You pick one. That hallway loops back to another floor. You try a different door, which sends you back to the lobby—but through a staircase you didn’t know existed.

After wandering around long enough, you can’t remember which form you need and you’re not even sure how you got there.

That’s what navigating Raleigh’s affordable housing webpages feels like.

There’s good information, unfortunately, it’s buried under confusing web design, esoteric labels, scattered across too many disconnected pages or missing altogether in outdated reports.

Ideally, you could do a broader redesign utilizing a landing page with imbedded drop-down menus. Short of that, I’d like to suggest a few improvements:

1. The affordable housing dashboard is a good start but lacks the level of detail that would make it worthwhile. For example, make a distinction between # of units completed, under construction or under contract, including Area Median Income.

2. Bond money – Without spending days combing through meeting minutes, it’s impossible to know what has been spent and where. You can consolidate this in a simple table showing the project name, amount invested, funding sources, number of units, AMI levels, expected completion dates with links to associated documents.

3. Include a table for other goals such as the number of households moved into permanent  housing and number of households kept in their housing through city funded assistance; and how those numbers stack up to the annual goals.

4. Track how much developers have pledged to the affordable housing fund, how much has been deposited, and how many units have been built.

5. Track NOAH units preserved and lost, with links to relevant documents.

6. Show annual rate of rents and homeownership, unit shortfall, what trends are driving the supply and demand, highlights and disappointments (like the developer who pulled out of the Moore Square project recently).

7. Include a list with links to all of the zoning cases that include affordable housing units or conditions.

8. Finally, gather all presentations related to affordable housing —whether to City Council, Planning Commission, or other groups—in  one place.

All of this information exists. We are simply asking for a better way to find it.

Sometimes pictures explain things better than words.

I encourage you look at Chapel Hill’s website as a way to showcase some of this information. They produce easy to understand reports both measuring their performance and explaining current issues, all in one accessible place, and with plenty of illustrative graphs.