500 L’Enfant Plaza SW Washington, DC 20024 urban.org Improving Measures of Housing Insecurity: A Path Forward Josh Leopold Mary Cunningham Lily Posey Tiffany Manuel URBAN INSTITUTE URBAN INSTITUTE URBAN INSTITUTE ENTERPRISE COMMUNITY PARTNERS November 2016 Housing insecurity is a real, persistent, and growing problem with implications for people’s education, health, and well-being. Although there is a general awareness among policymakers and the public about the causes and consequences of the affordable housing crisis, there are large gaps in our knowledge of different components of housing insecurity, the duration of housing insecurity and the relationship between housing insecurity and other forms of hardship. Much of the research treats the different dimensions of housing insecurity as discrete problems rather than part of a continuum of bad options for poor renters. As a result, policymakers do not have enough information about how many households experience housing insecurity, how they move in and out of different types of housing situations, and the effect of housing insecurity on other measures of material hardship and personal well-being. The field needs better measures of housing instability and would benefit from a standard set of measures, and possibly a standardized scale, that could be adapted for use in surveys across different domains. In this paper, we draw from the experience of the creation of the US Department of Agriculture’s Core Food Security Module to discuss the possible benefits of a standard scale of housing insecurity and the process for creating one. Dimensions of Housing Insecurity Housing insecurity can take a number of forms: homelessness; housing cost burden; residential instability; evictions and other forced moves; living with family or friends to share housing costs (doubling-up); overcrowding; living in substandard, poor quality housing; or living in neighborhoods that are unsafe and lack access to transportation, jobs, quality schools, and other critical amenities. We reviewed the current literature to document what we know about how each of these forms of housing insecurity are measured in the United States. Our review draws from population surveys, longitudinal surveys, and longitudinal administrative data. There is no single survey or administrative dataset that captures all the different components of housing insecurity. Table 1 summarizes the available data for measuring different forms of