Finding affordable housing can be challenging. Housing Navigator website aims to help

With options for affordable rental housing across the state in short supply, it can be difficult to know where to start looking.

The need for affordable housing that people can call home motivates Jennifer Gilbert, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Housing Navigator Massachusetts, to want to help bring transparency to the affordable housing market.

The new “self-service” data dashboards are designed to share the state’s count of affordable housing with dashboards for every city and town in Massachusetts for people looking for affordable housing options.

Gilbert said the data from the housing search tool they launched a year and a half ago was used to identify the location of affordable housing and who it would serve by checking details such as whether buildings are age-restricted or not.

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“Part of our mission, part of what we want to accomplish, is to put information out there about the totality of the inventory so that people – activists, policymakers, politicians, journalists, researchers – can use that information to really help build more housing and build it well-matched to the people who are looking,” she said.

Sharing affordable housing options

Visitors to the Housing Navigator website can search by city, street or zip code. She said they took this next step because their users requested this kind information about affordable housing options across the state.

For example, there were 71 New Bedford listings as of Feb. 1, including accessible units, age-restricted 55 plus or otherwise age-restricted. Some are marked rent based on income. Others signify whether the waitlists are open, closed or unknown.

The dashboard shows that in 2023 there were 210,591 affordable units with 3,777 affordable properties across the state, including 1,147 age-restricted properties and 2,537 non-age restricted properties.

She said they hope the public will access the dashboards on the Housing Navigator website to provide people with the information they are seeking and be part of conversations around affordable housing in their cities and towns.

Housing Navigator MA includes public and inclusionary housing in its inventory while defining affordable housing as a permanent rental property with an income restriction that accepts applications from the general public.

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Collecting the data

Gilbert said they first reached out to the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, an agency that was established in 2023 to create more homes and lower housing costs for Massachusetts residents, as well as other public sector housing agencies.

She said with a commitment to transparency, including citing known and possible gaps in the data on their website, they aim to best serve those needing affordable housing by serving as a resource to help them achieve their housing goals.

“By and large the cities and towns that we talked to are all excited to have more information like this, and we certainly hope if they see something that they’re wondering about, that we’ll hear from them,” she said.

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A look at New Bedford's dashboard

According to the data on the Housing Navigator dashboard for New Bedford, the supply of affordable rental housing in New Bedford in 2023 included 4,810 affordable units and 74 affordable properties.

And, according to the dashboard, there are 17 age-restricted properties and 56 non-age restricted properties in New Bedford.

Of the 2,640 units, 80 percent are non-age restricted. Of the 918 age-restricted units by rent type based on income, 62 percent are age-restricted, and of the 572 age-restricted units, 38 percent are fixed below market rent.

According to Jonathan Darling, public information officer in Mayor Jon Mitchell’s office, the city has been kept in the loop on the dashboard, and much of the data the city gets from other sources such as the state’s Subsidized Housing Inventory List and similar lists, as well as town data and records.

“The accuracy is pretty close with a major exception; this dashboard doesn’t seem to include data on housing vouchers,” he said. “For example, the dashboard shows 19 in 100 renter households in New Bedford are in income-restricted units, but our count is more like 30 in 100 because of the people using rental vouchers.”

He said the term affordable could also be considered subjective. He said the dashboard seems to use affordable to mean income-restricted, or for units that are restricted to those below certain income levels, but the term affordable in general is different for everyone.

“We use income-restricted and unrestricted as we feel these terms are less subjective and more objective,” he said.

Standard-Times staff writer Kathryn Gallerani can be reached at kgallerani@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter: @kgallreporter. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Standard-Times today.

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Nonprofit shares statewide data on how to find affordable housing