Public and Collaborative Housing Services

Project Background

Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing was an innovative collaboration between the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), the DESIS Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, and the Public Policy Lab. The project’s goals were twofold — to assist HPD in delivering more effective, efficient, and satisfying services, and to explore ways to facilitate the involvement of community residents in the development of housing-related services in neighborhoods with significant public- and private-sector investment leveraged by HPD.

We organized interview sessions and co-design workshops to identify
information gaps, areas of confusion, and pain points and opportunities in the application process. Building from research learnings, we co-developed a suite of pilots and supplemental resources to:

1. create new, human-centered informational materials,
2. encourage hyper-local marketing by developers,
3. support community-based housing ambassadors,
4. and form a street team for in-person HPD outreach.

In combination, the pilot activities and materials created a knowledge-sharing infrastructure that enabled dynamic and reciprocal exchange of information between residents, community-based partners, housing developers, and HPD leadership and front-line staff.

Fifteen years later, and many of these materials continue to be used today. The informational materials have been integrated into the agency’s online application platform and distributed in print. The Ambassador program is going strong with 46 organizations and growing.

Read the initial Public and Collaborative report here.
Read the Pilot Evaluation report here.

What We Found

Over the latter half of 2012, the Public Policy Lab conducted research with HPD leadership, front-line agency staff, staff at community-based organizations (CBOs) that offer housing assistance, developers of affordable housing, and current or potential users of the agency’s services.

The team observed HPD service spaces, assessed HPD online interfaces and application materials, conducted an audit of HPD information materials, and assessed affordable housing policy. We conducted site visits to HPD field office in Brooklyn and to HPD-sponsored developments in the Bronx. We facilitated interviews and workshops with developers, community-based organizations, HPD staff, and policymakers. We also conducted on-the-street interviews in Manhattan and the Bronx with several dozen past and potential affordable housing applicants.

Key Findings

Engagements with stakeholders in 2012-2013 revealed a number of challenges then faced by participants in the affordable-housing application process.

Information & Its Exchange Can Seem Fragmented & Impersonal. From the perspective of potential applicants, housing information was not easy to find or apply to their personal situations.
New Yorkers Do Not Know About HPD or Affordable Housing. Many residents assumed that all affordable units are targeted for extremely low-income households, or conversely, that affordable units were available to any applicant, regardless of income.
Residents Lack Clarity About the Application Process & Eligibility Requirements. Multiple applicants referred to the concept of “winning the [housing] lottery,” suggesting that they understood the selection of their application to mean they would definitely receive a new home, rather than signifying an opportunity to be screened for eligibility.
Applicants Misunderstand, Ignore, or Misinterpret Income Guidelines Many applicants seemed unclear on why and how to calculate their income; fundamental concepts, such as gross vs. net earnings, were not well understood. Income calculation was particularly challenging for applicants with overtime, part-time, or other variable income.
Applicant Screening Is Time-Intensive & Challenging. Marketing agents often spent a significant amount of time processing and interviewing applicants with a low success rate.
Some Community-Preference Slots Go Unused. Low community demand may have resulted when a neighborhood already had a significant number of HPD buildings, when relatively few income-eligible households resided in the community-board district, or when there was lack of sufficient developer outreach.

What We Designed

In response to the research findings, we developed four pilot proposals. These new services and materials were designed to create a knowledge-sharing infrastructure that enabled dynamic and reciprocal exchange of information among key stakeholders.

Pilot 1: Adopt New, Human-Centered Informational Materials

PPL created new informational materials, including a redesigned advertisement template to list information about a specific development, as well as a monthly-listings template that offers information about all available developments citywide. An income guide, application-process map, and a checklists document completed the suite of new HPD-branded informational materials.

Pilots 2 through 4 explored specific distribution channels for the informational materials.

Hyper-local marketing agents posted housing advertisements in everyday settings such as restaurants and laundromats.

Pilot 2: Encourage Hyper-Local Marketing

This pilot suggested that HPD supplement existing outreach by asking developers to share redesigned advertisements (described in Proposal 1, above) in public venues frequented by neighborhood residents, including laundromats, bodegas, and supermarkets, schools, churches, hospitals, gyms, libraries, and transit stations.

By targeting locations frequented by most community members at some point during the average week, more eligible residents could become aware of available units and apply.

Pilot 3: Support Housing Ambassadors

Many individuals and institutions support residents in applying for affordable housing, including neighborhood groups, nonprofit developers, community-based organizations, and many individuals with housing experience who blog about affordable housing, or help neighbors, friends, and family members through the application process. This pilot called for HPD to implement a pilot program, NYC Housing Ambassadors, to support their work by providing reliable resources and training—and to create a pipeline for HPD to learn from these on-the-ground representatives.

Pilot 4: Launch NYC Housing Connect Street Team

To address the lack of visibility and awareness of many affordable-housing programs, this proposal called for HPD to employ a street team in strategic locations and at specific events to: highlight HPD’s sponsorship of affordable housing, publicize the rollout of the NYC Housing Connect online application portal, and broaden the pool of eligible housing applicants.

Downloads During Pilot

Housing Ambassador Organizations

What We Implemented

The four pilots were implemented and evaluated during a pilot phase in late 2013 and early 2014. Using a range of qualitative and quantitative assessments—including results from a survey of nearly 2,500 New Yorkers—the evaluation team looked both at the process by which each of four pilot proposals was implemented and also the outcomes and impacts of those activities. Piloting and evaluation activities took place over 12 months, ending in July 2014.

The evaluation team found that the pilots clearly met the proposals’ stated design objectives: to encourage information accessibility and exchange, account for applicants’ lived reality, and enable more informed decision-making (although findings were somewhat mixed regarding the first of those objectives). The pilots also achieved their intended short-term outcomes, to create stronger support for community groups that provide applicants with assistance and to generate greater access to information about the process.

Piloting revealed that the informational materials and the housing ambassadors programs were particularly effective and suitable for scaling. Informational materials were downloaded more than 350,000 times during the eight-month pilot period. Implementation of the street team and hyper-local marketing proposals was successfully achieved, but the pilots also suggested a need for additional resources or different approaches before the programs were scaled up.

HPD ultimately implemented our informational materials, which are featured on their Housing Connect page under Applying for Affordable Housing. Along with the information materials, they also adopted our color and brand kit. One of the biggest successes of this project was the adoption and expansion of the Housing Ambassador program across the city. As of 2025, the program features more than 40 organizations. Learn more about the Housing Ambassador program in the video below.

Projects

Public and Collaborative Housing Services

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Public and Collaborative Housing Services

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Project Background

What We Found

What We Designed

What We Implemented

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Projects

Public and Collaborative Housing Services

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Public and Collaborative Housing Services

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Project Background

What We Found

What We Designed

What We Implemented

Menu

Get in Touch

Interested in partnering with us?

Join Us

We're Hiring!

We are accepting applications for a Graduate Summer Intern until February 23, 2026.

We're currently seeking applications for a Graduate Summer Intern. If interested, learn more about the role here. To hear about future job announcements, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.

Follow Along

Social Media

Donate

We're currently seeking applications for a Graduate Summer Intern. If interested, learn more about the role here.

To hear about future job announcements, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.