Community and Regional Planning faculty selected to update city of Austin’s Housing Opportunity Index

What informs the City of Austin’s decisions about where to build affordable housing? Community and Regional Planning Associate Professor Alex Karner and Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Mueller are examining the factors that shape these decisions and researching best practices to guide future policy. The faculty duo was selected to update the city’s Housing Opportunity Index after a competitive proposal process in fall 2025. PhD students Shayna Goldsmith and Hamidur Rahman are assisting with the robust effort.  

“Typical opportunity measures only consider what’s available within someone’s immediate neighborhood. But as people travel throughout the day, they’re able to reach different opportunities. For this reason, our index will measure how easily people can get to the things they need using available transportation options,” said Karner.  

The project, which kicked off in January, is more than a quantitative mapping exercise. Karner and Mueller are combining quantitative spatial analysis, with a comprehensive community engagement effort that includes focus groups to gather information about how people think about access to opportunity, and how where you live affects your quality of life. 

As detailed in their project scope, maps can reveal where poverty is concentrated, where housing is expensive, or where opportunity is high or low. But their work aims to tell us why these conditions exist and what the city and others can do about it. By analyzing how the quality of different types of amenities and public infrastructure intersect—such as public transit, education, jobs, and housing—the project team will identify specific neighborhood archetypes and target them for appropriate interventions. 

Their approach to this effort places significant weight on community input. For Karner, it is essential to hear directly from people who have or currently or want to live in affordable housing, and whose perspectives are typically left out of academic research. The team is also looking to update the scoring metrics to provide more transparency. 

“We want to make sure that the final index reflects the types of things that people want from their housing and neighborhoods. For people struggling with affordability, the things that matter most are often properties of the home itself: safety, security, comfort. These things are difficult to measure in advance but critical to capture,” said Karner.  

This fall, the team will finalize their recommendations and present the results to the city and community stakeholders. The project is set to wrap up by the end of the year. Further details are available at https://www.speakupaustin.org/OpportunityMap.