Few issues affect the strength and viability of neighborhoods and communities as much as housing – and few issues are more complex. The IU Public Policy Institute helps public and nonprofit community development and housing organizations cut through the complexity with services including program and system evaluation, market analysis, social benefit analysis, and program facilitation and implementation.

The Institute's effort to consider all of the variables that can affect community development led it to develop a compendium of spatial data (GIS) to identify potential synergies among public and nonprofit investments and to utilize statistical modeling to demonstrate the effects of neighborhood characteristics and both public and nonprofit investments on single-family property values.