Centering Residents: Measuring Satisfaction, Agency & Voice

We all want to like where we live. We receive satisfaction surveys for many aspects of our lives- from a trip to the doctor’s office to a stay at a hotel- but for too long many renters in affordable homes were expected to simply be happy to have a place to call home, without consideration for how that home and the services around it met their needs. This was especially true for people living in affordable/assisted rental homes.

Thankfully, we’re seeing shifts. Market-rate rental housing providers have tracked satisfaction for some time and more recent intiatives, including the White House Resident Centered Management Challenge, the Multifamily Impact Council Framework, and projects by a range of practitioners, are scaling the practice of responsive satisfaction measures in affordable housing. Platforms like WYL are moving beyond traditional surveys to provide flexible and consistent ways for residents to provide feedback. 

A focus on satisfaction is a positive, necessary movement towards more resident-centered homes. However, if we want to support people with the lowest incomes living in subsidized rental housing in achieving their goals around health, employment, education and economic mobility, we must go further than ‘good enough’. Residents may be satisfied with a property, but still lack feelings of social connection, power, and/or control. Housing and services must be connected in a way that recognizes and supports the agency of residents and gives them a real voice in how day-to-day life is carried out in their community.

Research demonstrates the importance of agency and voice. Even in subsidized properties operated by housing providers like SAHF members who are deeply committed to supporting resident well-being, residents may not experience the choices and sense of control in their lives that are essential for building and supporting equitable communities. Subsidized rental housing systems and policies – sometimes grounded in racist or racially biased assumptions about residents – have prioritized program compliance over residents’ voice or agency. Residents of subsidized housing don’t always have much choice in the place they call home because there are so few affordable options. People lucky enough to get a housing subsidy or affordable home have been told implicitly and explicitly that they should feel satisfied to simply have the home and that they should be careful to comply with all of the rules so they don’t lose it. So, while residents may feel satisfied, that doesn’t mean they feel much power to change things where they live. There are many examples of what’s possible when people and communities believe they can change things, from individual residents who engage with services to achieve their financial goals, like homeownership, to communities that become safer through resident-led safety initiatives and resident leaders who help bring information to their whole community. Shouldn’t we be focused on the policies and practices that help people bring about these changes in their communities? 

Building on our commitment to leveraging home as a platform to help residents achieve their goals, with the support of the Kresge Foundation and the RWJ Foundation, SAHF has explored this issue with our members over the past five years and has created multiple resources on the topic - Resident Voice and Agency in Affordable Rental Housing in 2020 and Measuring Agency and Voice in an Affordable Housing Setting in 2022. Our newly published resource guide updates this work and details specific ways in which housing providers can assess and measure whether residents feel like they have agency in the community where they live.

What is Agency? Why is it Important?

We define agency as having a feeling of control over our actions, or the “feeling of being in the driver’s seat when it comes to our actions.” Having a sense of agency is important for health and well-being, as “perceived control is associated with [an] enhanced ability to cope with stress,” as well as advancing racial equity, as racial marginalization hinders people’s ability to exercise adequate control over their own lives.  Additionally, agency is a fundamental component of economic mobility. In its report, “Boosting Upward Mobility,” the U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty states that “Mobility from poverty also requires autonomy and power—the ability to exercise control over one’s personal circumstances and to influence policies and practices that affect one’s life—and a sense of belonging—being valued by one’s community.”

Measuring Agency

How do we measure such a broad concept as agency, voice and power?  SAHF has identified four domains or concepts that are interconnected with the idea of agency: resident power or ownership of change, resident belonging, resident satisfaction, and civic engagement. 

For each of these domains, SAHF and SAHF members have collaboratively identified a key measure or survey question for residents (chart below).  With the help with Success Measures, SAHF arrived at these measures through examining research, including the CLF Healthy Communities Study, measures collected by other affordable housing networks and those collected by the SAHF members. These measures are now a component of SAHF’s broader Outcomes Initiative Measures, which is a common framework for affordable housing owners to examine outcomes and measures their impact on resident health, well-being and economic mobility. 

More information about how we arrived at each other these measures and use cases for housing providers and deeper dive measures are included in this resource guide. 

Moving Forward

Bringing about transformational change in resident outcomes and well-being requires that housing providers, policymakers and funders strive for more than ‘good enough’ and address the barriers to giving people real power and choice where they live. Measuring satisfaction can be a helpful first step in understanding residents’ experiences in affordable housing, but for outcomes and impact-oriented housing providers, measuring residents’ perceptions of their agency, voice and power is the next step to understanding how we can create more equitable, healthy communities. 

We’re encouraged by the increased focus on resident experience and satisfaction in the field. We hope our new practice-informed guide encourages affordable housing providers to build on that focus and deepen their work to advance resident agency. We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned and partnering to pilot new, practical measures that further accountability and help providers assess whether their program and policies advance or hinder resident agency, voice and power. 

Revisiting Measuring Agency & Voice: Updated Resource Guide / September 2024