Data Resources – Hopkins Housing & Health Collaborative
Housing Quality Metric
Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners have lacked small-area data to understand how housing quality issues vary across the US. The Housing Quality Metric (HQM) addresses this gap by providing novel data on poor-quality housing at the census tract level nationwide. Led by Collaborative member Veronica Helms, the HQM provides estimated rates of housing quality across three domains: physically inadequate housing, housing cost burden, and poor neighborhood perceptions. The data was created by applying estimates obtained from the 2021 American Housing Survey to data from the American Community Survey. A new article in the American Journal of Public Health details the approach and shows its initial associations with population health. The work, led by Helms, also includes Alyssa J. Moran, Thomas Cudjoe, Eliana M. Perrin, and Craig Pollack
The HQM is available for download here l along with a data dictionary . Estimates of poor-quality housing are available for census tracts, counties, and states.
Housing Quality Metric Data Files
Housing Quality Metric (HQM): Census Tracts Scoring in the Highest Quartile for all Three Poor Housing Quality Dimensions (n=8,329)
SEER-Medicare: Housing Assistance Data
New data are available to investigate the relationship between federal housing assistance and cancer.
The National Cancer Institute and the SEER registries partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to link the SEER-Medicare data with HUD administrative data on public and assisted housing program participants. The linkage of these data allows researchers to examine associations between housing assistance status and cancer presentation, treatment, and outcomes.
Collaborative members Craig Pollack, Veronica Helms, and Taylor Johnson were among the authors of a paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that describes this data linkage.
More information on accessing the data can be found here.
SEER-Medicare: Housing Assistance Data