Affordable housing advocates and developers to get new Oklahoma Housing Needs Assessment
Richard Mize, The Oklahoman
6 min read
An aerial view shows North Pointe Townhomes, 11800 N Western Ave., a tax exempt bond-financed development of 184 apartments by Ardmore-based LW Development.
EDMOND — An online resource used by affordable housing developers in Oklahoma, as well as lenders and others, is being revamped, updated and made interactive, forward looking and ongoing to keep helping get people into homes.
The new site, updating the one launched in 2016, will be deployed during summer 2024, then maintained and enhanced by OU, with some client service and troubleshooting, he said during an update on its development at the recent Commercial Real Estate Summit at the University of Central Oklahoma.
"We won't have a call center ... but we will have some customer service," Schaefer said.
Oklahoma Housing Needs Assessment is still used after seven years, but is dated
The Curve apartments are pictured in October in Moore.
The current site, with detailed information for each of Oklahoma's 77 counties, debuted in 2016 as a joint project of the Oklahoma Commerce Department and Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency, and was the first state housing analysis since 2001.
For each county, the 2016 report provided an analysis of household compositions, populations and subpopulations, and an assessment of communities' disaster readiness and preparation. Reports on larger counties provided comprehensive, city-specific data.
"It has been and continues to be utilized by developers, nonprofit organizations and other professionals who work to create affordable housing," OHFA spokesman Holley Mangham said. "It has played a vital role in determining what types of housing is needed and where it is needed the most."
The Oklahoma County reports alone have been downloaded more than 5,500 times since the site launched seven years ago, and altogether more than 167,500 documents have been downloaded, she said.
New-and-improved Oklahoma Housing Needs Assessment will be an interactive web portal
Shawn Schaefer, of the University of Oklahoma School of Architecture and owner of Places LLC, gives an update on the revamping of the Oklahoma Housing Needs Assessment at the recent Commercial Real Estate Summit at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Rather than a collection of 77 separate reports, the new-and-improved assessment will be "a tool for you to find data," Schaefer said.
The new web portal, using local, state and federal information as well as private, such as an MLS or CoStar, will allow users to search maps, tables and other presentations of data to easily find what they want, including individual affordable housing projects, he said.
"And it won't get seven years out of date," he said.
Mangham said some examples of affordable housing developed with tax credits or some other form of public financing include Pivot Tiny Houses, 201 NE 50; The Curve, 701 SW 17 in Moore, built where the May 20, 2013, tornado destroyed property; The Commons on Classen, 1320 Classen Drive; Forest Village Estates, 3101 N Bryant; and North Pointe Townhomes, 11800 N Western Ave.
What a statewide affordable housing developer thinks of revamping the 2016 Oklahoma Housing Needs Assessment
Lance A. Windel, a developer in Ardmore, has built affordable housing all over the state, including Ponca City, Enid, Guymon and Oklahoma City. He said it's past time to update the assessment site.
"We used the site extensively when it came out, but we haven't been using it recently as the data is so old," he said. "But when we used it, it was generally to determine the need for low- to moderate-income housing in areas we were interested in. It was often used as a tool to show lenders when we were pursuing loans for housing in certain markets."
He said he's looking forward to the interactive functions of a regularly updated portal.
"The other thing we are pushing for is for (the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency) to accept it in lieu of individual market studies for smaller developments, especially those associated with the new Housing Stability Program OHFA is going to administer.
"Individual market studies are running $,6000-plus each. That's a big hit to absorb if you're trying to build five homes in Stringtown with the new incentives. We're hoping OHFA will let us substitute the data from the new assessment at least for smaller developments."
OHFA spokesman Holley Mangham said the agency is still drafting applications for the Housing Stability Program but, for builders, accepts brokers' opinions of value in lieu of market studies.
OHFA itself used the 2015 assessment extensively and looks forward to the update, she said.
"OHFA used it in a myriad of ways. We have used the data as a scoring component of the Affordable Housing Tax Credit application. This allowed us to better address housing needs in counties that the study determined were underserved or lacked a good stock of affordable housing," Mangham said.
"It will be interesting to see what the new study shows about our production and preservation actions that were made based on the (old) study. The new study can also show what gaps we failed to address, if any, with the previous data," she said.
Frymire noted that the data does more than assess housing needs and marketing potential.
Based on what he learned at the Commercial Real Estate Summit, the new assessment "portends to provide a fluid interface" between data and users, said Darin A. Dalbom, president of NPVal LLC Real Estate Valuation and Consulting and a recent appointee to the OHFA board of directors.
He said he's still learning the ins and outs of affordable housing finance, but "The team who is putting this together has figuratively brought a gun to a knife fight, so I salute their creative thinking to set it up this way."
More specifically, Dalbom said, "What I really like in particular about this new housing study format is the way it will enhance forecasting for places like southern Oklahoma, which is poised for a population and employment explosion as the DFW metro area creeps northward."
For example, rents are lower in rural and small-town Oklahoma than Oklahoma City, Tulsa and other larger cities, but Durant is an exception.
"Rent prices are as high in Durant for Class C residential units as in certain areas of OKC and Tulsa. The housing study’s enhanced metrics will improve the process of defining need assessment for such areas," he said.
Shown is a home for lease in Duncan's Highland Trails addition, an affordable housing project by LW Development in Ardmore.
Senior Business Writer Richard Mize has covered housing, construction, commercial real estate and related topics for the newspaper and Oklahoman.com since 1999. Contact him at rmize@oklahoman.com. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Real Estate with Richard Mize.You can support Richard's work, and that of his colleagues, by purchasing a digital subscription to The Oklahoman. Right now, you can get 6 months of subscriber-only access for $1.
