We have completed over 40 MVAs for city, county and state governments including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA; Baltimore, MD; New Orleans, LA; Kansas City, MO; Jacksonville, FL; and the state of Delaware.
Among our most recent MVAs was the analysis done for the City of Dallas, where it is serves as a framework for the City’s first comprehensive housing policy.
Decades of policy in Dallas had created a city that sharply divided along racial and economic lines. The city also had a housing shortage of approximately 20,000 units, and 4 out of 10 families in Dallas were housing cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
The development of the Dallas MVA was intended to help the city better understand the role that the private market could play in the creation and preservation of affordable housing. The resulting analysis offered the foundation for a comprehensive new policy that positioned the city to address affordability and use incentives and programs to address patterns of segregation and concentrations of poverty.
Reinvestment Fund worked directly with the City of Dallas’ Mayor, Council, Chief of Economic Development and an MVA steering committee throughout the study process. Steering committee participants represented a diverse group of public agencies, real estate professionals and nonprofit organizations committed to ensuring the viability and equitable growth of neighborhoods. By engaging stakeholder voices early, the city was able to hear and address feedback as the analyses progressed.
Once Reinvestment Fund internally reviewed the datasets, steering committee members, as people with local expertise, provided their insights into the validity of the data and the preliminary analysis results. The process of reviewing the datasets and analysis, helped “level-set” among the participants and ultimately provided a common understanding of the forces shaping the strength of the private real estate market in Dallas.
The results of the MVA are presented as a map of the city representing the different market types – from strongest to weakest across the city. The MVA served as the basis for the identification (and proper resourcing) of Revitalization Areas, Stabilization Areas and Emerging Market Areas.