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A Family-Centered Framework for Considering Access to Housing

Authors


Notes

Sara Shaw and Dana Thomson were co-lead authors

While access to housing is a challenge for many households, those with children and low incomes face additional barriers to accessing affordable (e.g., less than 30% of their income[1]), safe, and stable housing that meets their needs. Discussions of housing access are often focused on supply and demand in the housing market—with limited consideration to whether or not the supply of housing is appropriate for households with children. Families’ ability to access affordable, safe, and stable housing that meets their needs is important for children’s health and development and for families’ economic well-being.

For this resource, we draw from existing literature on housing quality, neighborhood effects, and family well-being to offer a framework for conceptualizing access to housing that centers the needs of families—a first step toward expanding our understanding of housing access beyond traditional supply and demand metrics. Research has documented how families must navigate multiple simultaneous challenges when seeking housing: balancing affordability with their children’s educational stability, weighing housing quality against proximity to family support networks, and considering neighborhood safety alongside access to employment opportunities.

We hope this framework provides a structure by which local housing authority administrators, policymakers, and researchers can more holistically consider the complex trade-offs that families face, with the goal of supporting research, policy, and practice that reflect the multifaceted nature of families’ housing needs.

Our framework captures these complexities through five dimensions[2] of housing access:

  1. Availability: There is a sufficient supply of housing units appropriate for families and the process of obtaining housing is accessible and fair.
  2. Affordability: Families can sustain housing costs long-term without economic hardship.
  3. Safety and Quality: Housing conditions support families’ physical and mental health and well-being.
  4. Community Resources: The environment in which the housing is located supports families’ physical and mental health and well-being.
  5. Alignment With Family Needs: Housing features match families’ specific circumstances.

In addition to the five dimensions, the framework incorporates four cross-cutting factors—stability, family agency in decision making, protection from discrimination, and coordination across dimensions—that influence every aspect of housing access. For example, stability is relevant to all five dimensions: Families need reliable access to available housing, sustained affordability of housing costs, consistent housing quality and maintenance, sustained access to community resources, and reliable access to transportation for caregivers to attend work or school. When using the framework to identify policy questions or metrics for tracking progress on goals related to improving access to housing for families, these cross-cutting considerations should be factored into each dimension.


Figure: Multi-dimensional family-focused housing access framework

Figure: Multi-dimensional family-focused housing access framework

This framework emerged from our ongoing work to examine housing access for families with children. In recent analyses, for example, we found that traditional measures of housing access—those that focus on availability and affordability alone—often underestimate families’ challenges in finding housing that is appropriate for their needs. When adding an additional dimension—such as whether families have sufficient space for their family size (under the Alignment With Family Needs dimension)—we found an even greater housing shortage for families with children and very low incomes than suggested by typical supply-demand calculations. This is just one example of how a family-focused framework, such as the one we’ve presented here, might broaden public understanding of families’ complex and nuanced housing needs and point to potential solutions.

We intend this working draft framework to represent a starting point for ongoing conversations around improving access to affordable, safe, and stable housing that meets the needs of families with children. It can and should be tailored to specific community needs. Rather than a checklist of requirements, these dimensions offer a structured way to think about the multiple factors that influence housing access, some of which may be harder than others to quantify.

We invite local housing authority administrators, policymakers, and researchers to engage with this initial framework and provide feedback on how it might be helpful for them in their work—for example, to evaluate their current housing stock’s alignment with families’ needs, to understand or measure housing gaps in a family-centered way, to identify specific areas of strength or challenges related to families’ access to housing, or to explore more holistic housing solutions for families with children. To facilitate this dialogue, we plan to convene experts (including families) and practitioners to refine the framework. Following this collaborative process, we aim to develop practical resources that states and local housing authorities can use to measure and improve housing access for families across multiple dimensions.


Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ashley Hirilall and Sunny Sun for their ongoing thought partnership, and to all of our Child Trends colleagues who continue to advance family-centered approaches to their work on housing. We also want to thank Patti Banghart, Sarah Daily, Nicole Forry, Audrey Franchett, Sarah Friese, Van-Kin Lin, Kelly Maxwell, Katie Paschall, and Kathryn Tout for their ongoing work to develop and implement a family-centered approach for understanding access to early care and education, which inspired the present framework. And we would like to extend a special thanks to Audrey Franchett for creating the visualization that brings this framework to life. We also appreciate the feedback from Marsha Basloe (MRB Connects), Nathan Bossie (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development), Tracy Duarte (Pennsylvania Head Start Collaboration Office), Margaret Schuelke (Project Community Connections Inc.) and Joe Willard (HopePHL) on the early development of the product. From our Child Trends team, we want to thank Kristen Harper, Chrishana M. Lloyd, Renee Ryberg, and Kathryn Tout for their thoughtful review and guidance. Finally, this product would not have been possible without the Child Trends communications team, including Catherine Nichols, who finalized the design; Brent Franklin for his careful editing; and Matt Haugen, Stephen Russ, Olga Morales, Kelley Bennett, and Emily Baqir.


Footnotes

[1] Housing affordability is typically measured using a threshold of 30 percent of household income spent on housing costs. However, this standard metric may oversimplify the complex financial tradeoffs families face. A more precise understanding of housing burden would consider whether families have sufficient remaining income to cover other essential needs—such as food, health care, transportation, and child care—after paying for housing. The true measure of affordability should reflect housing costs in the context of a family’s complete budget for basic necessities.

[2] Please note that these dimensions are not intended to be mutually exclusive and that some factors that affect families’ access to housing may fit in multiple dimensions.

Suggested citation

Shaw, S., & Thomson, D. (2025). A family-centered framework for considering access to housing. Child Trends. DOI: 10.56417/5068h9050u

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