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Workforce Housing Forums

The availability of affordable workforce housing has become increasingly important in recent years. In many communities, the people that provide vital services to the community— teachers, firefighters, police officers, and restaurant workers — often cannot themselves afford to live there. Shortages of workforce housing can impact transportation systems, traffic congestion and commute time, environmental conditions, employee recruitment and retention, and a community’s economic stability.

An important role that REALTOR® associations can play in addressing these issues is to hold forums to bring together key players in the community to examine how the lack of affordable housing opportunities is affecting the community and to explore strategies to address these issues. Since 2008, NAR has conducted a series of regional workforce housing forums to raise awareness about the growing need for more affordable housing opportunities for working families and bring REALTORS® together with others working to advance workforce housing.

The Workforce Housing Forum Guide: A Strategy for Outreach and Advocacy outlines how to plan and conduct a workforce housing forum to identify and develop strategies to address a community’s workforce housing needs. The guide includes tips and tools for setting goals, identifying partners, selecting speakers, managing resources, handling logistics, etc., along with examples of successful forums conducted by REALTOR® associations.

You can download the entire Guide to print and review. You can also print out individual tools and resources for staff and committee members to discuss and then customize.

Workforce Housing Forum Guide: Tools & Resources

Following is a collection of Tools & Resources to assist you, organized to correspond with the sections in the Workforce Housing Forum Guide. Each section below also includes example documents used in other forums. Reference these as needed to get an idea of what you'll want for your forum.

Getting-Started

Planning the Forum

Conducting the Forum

After-the-Forum

Call for Action + Issue Awareness 

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