In January 2020, even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jerome Lewis, director of the Biden School’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA), saw a need to address affordable housing in Delaware.
“IPA is concerned about action in affordable housing. There are multiple issues at play here, including finances and land-use,” said Lewis. “We need to make affordable housing a bigger part of local comprehensive planning and communities need to step up and do their part.”
Lewis approached Metraux about forming a housing collaborative that combined CCRS’s expertise in community development and homelessness research with IPA’s expertise in land use planning, transportation and aging in place. This team includes Julia O’Hanlon and Sean O'Neill,IPA policy scientists; Roger Hesketh, CCRS assistant policy scientist; and Mimi Rayl, CCRS graduate research assistant and housing initiative coordinator.
IPA’s well-established relationships with state and local government agencies throughout Delaware enable the centers to coordinate and build on current momentum.
“We as a team can support already existing initiatives in the state, like the work being done by the Delaware State Housing Authority (DSHA), HAD and nonprofit organizations, including United Way of Delaware,” O’Hanlon noted. “We can be the connectors to help ensure that housing issues in Delaware – including affordability and access – are approached and dealt with more systematically and from an evidence-based perspective.”
Specializing in health policy and gerontology, O’Hanlon is particularly concerned with ensuring vulnerable populations stay connected in the community.
“Where people live and how they can get to places of interest is really important. I think a lot about access to food, medical appointments, social services and community,” O’Hanlon noted. “Statewide you will find varying issues in terms of where people live and how they get to places of need.” These issues include availability of affordable housing, quality of housing, public transportation and community safety.
As a certified planner with real estate experience, O’Neill partners with local governments and community organizations throughout the state to work on comprehensive plans, housing studies and land use planning.
“You have to take different approaches throughout the state depending on the needs of the community and region,” O’Neill acknowledged. “It’s a totally different set of problems for Western Sussex County as it is for Eastern Sussex County or Wilmington.
“In this process we talked to dozens of people throughout the state, in each county, state level, local level and nonprofits,” said O’Neill. One of their first conversations was with Brad Whaley and Brandy Nauman, with Sussex County’s community development and housing department, to learn about the county’s Housing Opportunities and Market Evaluation study.
“Housing has not been a focus in Sussex County, but quality housing needs attention, and it’s starting to get attention from the county council,” O’Neill added. “As the beach communities develop and get wealthier they are reliant on a resort-type atmosphere, and that whole economy relies on service workers. But those service workers can’t afford to live in the beach communities and they look for housing farther west. The farther west you go, the quality of the housing gets really poor.”
HAD also has faced challenges in applying for funding due to gaps in available data. Rhine explained that the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) funds can be used to address homelessness in qualified census tracts without documentation. However, “because Delaware is such a small state, there is no qualified census tract in Sussex. We don’t have the ability to drill down on areas of need.”
O’Neill and Rayl now serve on the Sussex Housing Group’s Data Committee to help identify opportunities to improve data collection and data sharing, both in the county and throughout the state.
“We hope to take a research role to analyze what’s going on and to bring people together,” O’Neill said. “There are a lot of people working on this throughout the state, but there hasn’t been a way to bring people together. It’s difficult to make those connections based on the way things are structured right now. That’s not unique to Delaware as a state, but given that Delaware is a small state, it’s achievable and we should try to work on it.”