Housing & Asset Building

Faced with limited housing supply and soaring rents and home prices, more people, particularly with low incomes, struggle to find or keep an affordable, safe place to live. Ripple effects of the affordable housing crisis include increasing health challenges, declining educational outcomes, and surging homelessness. Abt’s decades of rigorous evidence-building work with federal, state, local, and non-profit partners—combined with our training and technical assistance expertise—inform today’s efforts to make housing more affordable. We continue to shape rental assistance programs like Housing Choice Vouchers and public housing, policies to boost production and preservation of affordable housing, and initiatives to help make homeownership feasible. Our partners and teams with lived expertise enrich our cross-sector, data-driven approach with first-hand insights, enabling us to advance housing affordability for all.

Abt studies the drivers of economic inclusion. Our insights lead to more effective policies, programs and interventions. How can consumers make better purchasing decisions? What is their experience with credit? How can housing counseling support sustainable homeownership? How can financial literacy programs encourage asset-building and promote equity across populations? We see answers to questions like these as vital to the well-being of low-, moderate-, and middle-income Americans.

Abt’s rigorous research, insights and technical assistance enable policymakers and practitioners to understand the scope of homelessness in America and identify what works to prevent and reduce it. Our team partners with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to produce national estimates of homelessness. With federal, state, and non-profit clients, we also examine the disparate effects of homelessness across races, ethnicities, ages, and abilities, including on military veterans, families, and youth. We help federal grantees, communities and nonprofits build capacity to manage prevention and assistance programs to move people from the streets into stable housing. And we partner with those same communities, as well as people with lived experience, to design scalable, equitable systems that meet their needs and preferences.