Thank you for visiting this site to learn about the MacArthur Foundation’s new competitive housing research grant program and the requirements for submitting a proposal. The Foundation anticipates requesting proposals again in 2010 and 2011. The purpose of this web page is to provide complete information for applying for a grant, along with background material to help applicants develop the strongest, most responsive proposals.

The Context

The MacArthur Foundation has a long history of engagement with affordable housing issues. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the Foundation made program-related investments (PRIs) in financial intermediaries that invest in affordable housing projects. In 1999, it launched a new initiative in support of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation of public housing into mixed-income communities. In 2001, after a number of grantees and PRI borrowers raised concerns about the declining stock of affordable rental housing, the Foundation made a new round of investments through PRIs to help preserve affordable rental properties at risk of leaving the nation’s inventory of low-cost homes. This effort became a signature Foundation program, Window of Opportunity: Preserving Affordable Rental Housing. Including a new expansion of Window of Opportunity, which supports comprehensive policy changes through grants and PRIs to innovative state and local government programs by 2010 the Foundation’s total investment in affordable housing will exceed $500 million.

Rather than informing policy principally through practice, as the Foundation’s preservation and public housing investments attempt to do, the new competitive research program would be more directly policy-focused. Its purpose is to determine whether the policy case for affordable housing can be strengthened by rigorous empirical research that determines if and how housing affects the well-being of families, children, communities and their local economies — beyond the shelter value of the physical dwelling itself. Rigorous research may also yield more compelling narratives about the importance of housing in family and community outcomes that often are a prerequisite for long-term policy change.

Responding to the Call for Proposals

Technical Information

1. By close of business (CST) April 17, 2009, applicants should submit electronically a brief summary of the proposed research. The summary should not exceed three single-spaced typewritten pages and identify the specific, housing problem or issue that the empirical study would address and its relevance for policy. The summary should also identify any hypotheses to be tested, data required and a brief description of the proposed methodology.
2. Research summaries should state the desired terms of the grant. The Foundation will consider supporting studies of one-, two-, or three-year duration, and at a total cost to the Foundation over the project term of no more than $1 million. More costly projects are also eligible for consideration if resources are available from other funders, who should be identified in the submission.
3. Applicants must be affiliated with a non-profit entity and comply with the Foundation’s indirect cost policies that generally limit such costs to no more than 15 percent of total direct costs.
4. Research summaries should be submitted by e-mail to Ms. Gerry Sims at Gsims@macfound.org. Summaries may be submitted as text, or attached to the email as a PDF or Microsoft Word file. The e-mail should also include a preferred contact’s full name, title, institution, address, and telephone/fax numbers.
5. Applicants will be notified whether they have been selected to submit a full proposal by June 19, 2009. It is anticipated that this call for proposals will result in the funding of as many as 10 projects.
6. Complete proposals must be received by the Foundation by 6 p.m. CDST, August 19, 2009. Further guidelines and required supplementary materials will be provided to successful applicants who are invited to submit full proposals.

Signal Grants

This formal launch of the competitive grant program was preceded by a December 2008 award of a cluster of “signal” grants that are intended to provide to the research community concrete examples of the rigor, varied approaches and breadth of proposals that the Foundation would expect to support in its research portfolio. By supporting sophisticated modeling efforts and ethnographic studies; senior academics and emerging scholars; diverse disciplinary investigators from health clinicians, to economists, and sociologists; and by funding both university-based and public agency-sponsored research, these signal grants are also intended to demonstrate in concrete ways the Foundation’s commitment to enlarging the quality and diversity of the research evidence that is needed to answer the critical policy question of How Housing Matters.

The purpose of providing these abstracts is not to limit applicants’ thinking about how to address this program’s theme, but to provide concrete examples of actual studies that have been funded in advance of the formal launch of the program.

• Northwestern University
  Using Biomarkers to Measure Impact of Housing Choice Vouchers on Adult Health Outcomes

  This study would use survey research and scientific measurement of health biomarkers to measure the health impacts of Section 8 housing vouchers on public housing residents participating in HUD’s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. More rigorous estimates of potential health effects of housing assistance is directly relevant to a wide range of housing policy questions, and to broader efforts to improve the health outcomes of low-income families living in some of the nation’s most disadvantaged urban communities.

• Wayne State University
  Magnitudes and Mechanisms of Neighborhood Impacts on Children: Analyzing a Natural Experiment in Denver

  Using a natural experiment-type research design, this study will quantify how various conditions in the surrounding neighborhood affect independently a variety of outcomes for low-income individuals who resided in public housing for a substantial period of time during childhood. It will also probe causal pathways through which neighborhood conditions or environments might cause these outcomes. Assumptions about the degree to which neighborhoods affect the life chances of disadvantaged families are present in all assisted housing programs, and research that attempts to measure and explain the mechanisms through which those effects may be transmitted from neighborhoods to residents would provide important insights to policymakers.

• Boston Medical Center/Children’s Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP)
  Housing Instability and Children’s Health

  Using pediatric clinical data from five participating acute care facilities, supplemented by demographic and socioeconomic data from intake interviews, this study is testing the hypothesis that housing insecurity, defined as crowding or doubling up or multiple moves within a calendar year, is associated with poorer health outcomes for children under three years of age. Should variations in the stability of young children’s early housing experiences explain variations in health outcomes health, such scientifically-based information could help strengthen the policy case for affordable housing.

• Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
  Monitoring Mount Laurel: The Effects of Low Income Housing on People and Places

  This study of neighborhood effects, which grows out of the widely known Mount Laurel exclusionary zoning decisions of the New Jersey Supreme Court, overcomes a methodological challenge inherent in the use of cross-sectional data that makes it difficult to determine whether poor people move to poor places, or poor places make people poor. It does so through the use of a longitudinal research design that tracks individuals over time. Rigorous studies of the effectiveness of regulatory reforms in expanding housing opportunities that in turn may improve the life chances of families would be directly relevant to a wide range of housing policy and program design issues.

• University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison
  The Role of Eviction in the Perpetuation of Urban Poverty

  The study uses survey-based and ethnographic methods to explore how inner-city landlords in Milwaukee use and abuse eviction as a management tool, and the impact of forced mobility on the social and economic lives of low-income families. While the research literature on eviction pays little attention to what happens to people after they lose their houses, this study uses mixed methods to explore whether and how eviction may contribute to the perpetuation of urban poverty.

• Initiative for a Competitive Inner City
  Driving Inner City Economic Growth: Analysis of the Economic Potential of the Construction, Housing and Real Estate Cluster

  This project assesses the contributions of the construction, housing, and real estate (CHRE) cluster to inner city, central city, and regional economies, and evaluates private sector strategies and public policies that would strengthen CHRE activity in ways that would expand business and employment opportunities for inner-city populations. A substantial body of employment-related housing research focuses on labor market dynamics and the impacts of housing assistance on recipients’ work effort, while this project attempts to create evidence to support an economic competitiveness case for affordable housing.

• Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City/Department of Housing Preservation and Development
  Planning Grant for Housing and Neighborhoods Impact Study

  This grant would enable the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to develop a multi-year panel study of how subsidized rental housing affects household health outcomes and children’s educational progress. The research design would have three distinguishing features to enhance policy relevance: (i) a lottery process for allocating units to eligible households mimics random assignment experiment with carefully defined treatment and control groups; (ii) because New York City policy requires 50 percent of units in a project to be allocated to residents of the same neighborhood in which the housing is located, the research may be able to disentangle housing from neighborhood effects; and (iii) due to high housing costs, the City’s subsidized housing programs are targeted to a much wider range of incomes and neighborhoods than in most other places, this study would enable sensitivity analysis of the social impacts of affordable housing with respect to income.

A Note on the Foreclosure Crisis

While the How Housing Matters grant program aims to inform a long-term vision for affordable housing policies, the Foundation is mindful of the financial and nonfinancial costs of the foreclosure crisis on families and communities. Therefore, research proposals on foreclosure will be eligible for consideration as long as they meet the broad program requirements, chief among them being the development of a research design that enables the study to rigorously estimate how foreclosure adversely affects families and communities, and how the proposed research could inform future policies.

FAQ

Since issuing program guidelines, the Foundation has received a number of questions asking for clarifications or information about program requirements that the guidelines did not address. The following list of Questions and answers to them cover all of the queries received to date. This FAQ page will be updated as necessary.

1. Question: Can a potential applicant speak with a member of the Foundation staff for clarification or advice in advance of submitting a Research Summary?

   Answer: Due to the competitive nature of this grant program and an interest in treating all applicants equally, Foundation staff cannot advise you or discuss a possible proposal with you.

2. Question: Must one be a U.S. citizen to be eligible to submit a Research Summary under the program guidelines?

   Answer: Non-U.S. citizens are eligible to apply.

3. Question: Are How Housing Matters research proposals that are based in non-U.S. settings, eligible?

   Answer: Yes, they are eligible as long as they meet all program guidelines.

4. Question: Must citations, research references, and biographical information about the Principal Investigator or research team be included in the 3-page limit for the Research Summary, or can these be included in an addendum?

   Answer: All information about the project, including the above items, must be included in the 3-page Research Summary. Invited formal proposals will have no page limit, but the Foundation will strictly adhere to the specified limit for the first round of the competition.

5. Question: Can an individual be written into two separate proposals, and if so, under what conditions?

   Answer: A person can be written into two separate research proposals as long as the projects are separate and independent of each other. It would not be permissible for a person to be written into two or more related proposals where, for example, the projects are part of a multi-site evaluation or other project subject to a consistent research design. In that case, the multi-site project should be written and submitted as a single project. In no case, may a multi-site proposal be submitted as several separate research projects in order to bypass the total project cost limit of $1 million.

6. Question: How detailed must the project budget be in the Research Summary?

   Answer: A total budget is required to enable reviewers to select the best and most responsive submissions for the next stage of the competition without exceeding the Foundation’s budget constraints. It would be helpful to reviewers if, along with a total budget and project term up to three years, Research Summaries contained the desired allocation of grant payments over that term.

7. Question: Are units of government eligible to apply for a grant under the program guidelines?

   Answer: Yes. Please make sure that your unit of government is permitted by law to receive a grant.

8. Question: Must a Research Summary identify a project director or Principal Investigator who will be in charge of the research, or is it possible for an applicant to submit a proposal without a named director or PI who would be secured only if the project is funded?

   Answer: All submissions without exception must identify by name the person or persons who will direct the research.

9. Question: If I am invited to submit a formal proposal does that mean that my project will be funded?

   Answer: The Foundation intends to give full consideration to all applicants who are invited to submit proposals in the second round of competition. However, the proposals must meet all program guidelines and reflect the Research Summaries from which they were derived. No prior guarantees can be given, but the Foundation will give all applicants who have submitted a full proposal an opportunity to correct any problems found in the formal review.

10. Question: To what amount does the Foundation’s 15% indirect cost policy apply?

    Answer: The 15% indirect cost policy relates only to the total grant amount awarded by the Foundation, regardless of whether the the grant is further sub-granted to another institution. Thus, for example, if a project were to receive a $1,000,000 grant from the Foundation, indirect costs on that grant would not be permitted to exceed $150,000, regardless of indirect costs charged by any sub-grantee. Since indirect costs take resources away from research tasks, it would be up to the grantee to set limits on what any sub-grantee would be permitted to charge to its share of the project budget.

11. Question: Do research studies have to address an “affordable housing” issue?

    Answer: While the larger ambition of this grant program is to inform affordable housing policies, the empirical research does not have to address affordable housing as long as the proposed studies meet all other published guidelines.

12. Question: When will the Foundation inform organizations about whether or not they will be requested to submit a full proposal?

    Answer: Because of the unexpectedly large response to the solicitation, the Foundation will inform each applicant via email whether it should submit a full proposal for further consideration on or before June 19, 2009. Any additional time that may be required for the initial review phase will not reduce allowable time for the preparation of full proposals. The due date for receipt of all full proposals will be 6 p.m. CDST August 19, 2009. Instructions for submitting full proposals will be contained in the notification message of June 19. Finally, because of the potential volume of inquiries we might receive and the time it would take away from the review process itself, we will not be responding to any inquiries about the status of any research summary.

Updated June 3, 2009