Building Housing Intelligence for California

Senate Bill (SB) 423 (D-Weiner-San Francisco), Land use: streamlined housingapprovals: multifamily housing developments; Assembly Bill (AB) 2653(D-Santiago-Los Angeles), Planning and Zoning Law: housing elements; and otherhousing legislation have aimed to alleviate California’s housing production shortfall bybuilding more affordable housing faster. However, the legislation has also led to alarger volume of housing data flowing to the Department of Housing and CommunityDevelopment (HCD), requiring additional data processing and validation on a shortertime frame. Housing production data is reported to HCD by 539 jurisdictions (cities and counties) across the state.ODI partnered with HCD to build a tool called Homestead to mine, analyze, and visualize that data so HCDstaff can have in-depth, granular knowledge on the state of housing production. The housingdevelopment process itself can be mired in review and with each jurisdiction comes a different set ofproject identifiers, local procedures, and reporting practices.