Location Affordability Portal
While housing expenditures are usually easy to determine, transportation costs are much less transparent. The Location Affordability Portal seeks to bridge that information gap in order to help consumers, researchers, and policymakers better understand the impact of transportation costs on affordability.
A joint project between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the goal of the Location Affordability Portal is to provide the public with reliable, user-friendly data and resources on combined housing and transportation costs to help consumers, policymakers, and developers make more informed decisions about where to live, work, and invest.
The Portal features two new cutting-edge tools — the Location Affordability Index and My Transportation Cost Calculator—that illustrate from different perspectives how housing and transportation costs impact affordability. In addition to these decision-support tools, the Portal provides access to supporting resources that offer a wide range of information on current research and practice aimed at understanding, and ultimately reducing, the combined housing and transportation cost burden borne by American families.
My Transportation Cost Calculator generates transportation cost estimates based on user-entered information, providing households, real estate professionals, and housing counselors customized, apples-to-apples comparisons of housing and transportation costs in different communities.
Developers, planners and policymakers can use the Location Affordability Index to make data-driven decisions about local and regional planning and investment. They can also use maps and data tools to help communicate with the public about different development scenarios.
Researchers can readily access housing and transportation cost estimate data at the Census block-group level for all 942 MSAs covered by the Index.
