Thank you for visiting this site to learn about the MacArthur Foundation’s competitive housing research grant program on How Housing Matters to Families and Communities. This webpage provides complete information for submitting a proposal as part of the 2010 competition, along with background material to help applicants develop strong and responsive proposals. Context for the competition, along with the technical information necessary to apply, are outlined below. Visitors will also find information on previous winners.

Context

The MacArthur Foundation’s interest in housing dates back more than 20 years. By 2012, we will have invested over $300 million in housing — more than two-thirds since 2000. This commitment is an expression of concern about both people and place and a rich blend of research, policy, and practice. The Foundation’s investments have played a key role in addressing the housing and housing-related challenges facing our home city of Chicago and the nation.

In particular, MacArthur has enhanced Chicago’s capacity to respond with solid facts to questions about the progress of its Plan for Transformation of public housing and its impact on residents. In addition, recognizing a national trend in a dwindling supply of quality affordable rental housing, MacArthur made a $150 million commitment known as Window of Opportunity: Preserving Affordable Rental Housing. The initiative is designed to demonstrate that preserving affordable rental housing is a cost-effective way to extend the significant past public and private investment in housing, to strengthen families and communities, and encourage a wide mix of public and private institutions and partnerships to invest and participate in the preservation of affordable rental housing. By accomplishing its objectives, the initiative will yield the evidence, models, momentum, and leadership needed to generate policy reforms aimed at a bold goal: preserving one million units of affordable rental housing in a decade, which is intended to ensure that every new unit of affordable housing is a net addition to the affordable inventory.

Background: How Housing Matters

How Housing Matters to Families and Communities is a five-year, $25 million research effort that expands the Foundation’s commitment to affordable housing. This research initiative seeks to broaden the literature on the impact investments in affordable housing have on a host of other social and economic outcomes beyond merely providing shelter. If this research program achieves its goals, instead of justifying billions of dollars that the federal government spends on housing subsidies through anecdotal and largely unsubstantiated claims about the effects of housing investments, policymakers will be better able to direct increasingly scarce public resources to enhance housing outcomes and to achieve broader goals of healthier, better educated, and more successful families and communities.

How Housing Matters is intended to explore the notion that affordable housing may be an essential “platform” that promotes a wide array of positive human outcomes in education, employment, and physical and mental health, among other areas. A rigorous program of near-term and longer-term research, focused on questions of interest to policymakers, will make it possible for housing policy to achieve a greater return on investments in these important areas of concern.

The research initiative has two components: a proposed interdisciplinary research network, for which no proposals are being solicited through this call, and a research competition. The research network, composed of select experts in housing, child development, and other disciplines, will develop original concepts and hypotheses and test new housing-human development relationships — about how housing matters to young children in the contexts of their immediate and extended families, neighborhoods, and schools — that have never been explored systematically, and for which good data has not previously existed. The competitive research program, which this call for abstracts describes, attempts to build upon and deepen evidence in a broader range of areas in which empirical research has previously established what the hypotheses should be and the likely pathways and mechanisms through which housing effects are transmitted.

Current Grantees

Two rounds of the research competition have already been completed. First, in 2008, seven invitational grants were made to provide concrete examples to the research and policy communities of the rigor, approach and breadth that would be expected in the competitive portfolio. These grants demonstrate the Foundation’s interest in proposals from public agencies and collaborations between housing scholars and experts from non-traditional disciplines, such as health, education and labor, among other important fields.

In the first quarter of 2009, the Foundation initiated the formal competitive grant program through a public call for three-page research summaries to be submitted to the Foundation. After receiving 217 summary proposals and an intensive internal review process, a total of 31 research summaries were invited for participation in the second phase of the competition. A formal request for proposal (RFP) was sent to each finalist. A total of 29 proposals were received by the posted deadline, and ultimately 13 projects were selected for awards totaling more than $5.8 million.

2010 Call for Research Abstracts

In the 2010 competition, the MacArthur Foundation seeks to expand further the body of empirical evidence on the difference that living in decent and affordable housing makes in the lives of children, their families and communities; and with a special emphasis on how such evidence can be put to use by decision-makers to strengthen policies and programs.

In this year’s competition, in order to maximize the impact that funded research will have on policy, the Foundation requires that every applicant clearly identify the specific policy audience or level of government that will be able to utilize the research to improve or enhance a specific policy intervention and improve outcomes being studied.

Technical Information

1. Applicants should submit electronically an abstract of the proposed research by March 22, 2010 (6 p.m. Central Standard Time). The abstract should not exceed three single-spaced typewritten pages (12-point font, one-inch margins) and identify the specific housing problem and non-housing outcomes or issues that the empirical study would address, and its relevance for policy.

   Specifically, the abstract should include a brief description of each of the following:

   1. the hypotheses to be tested;
   2. data sets required;
   3. the proposed methodology;
   4. anticipated outcomes; and
   5. the policy audience and justification for the project, and how the research results would meet known policy needs.

   NOTE: Should an abstract lead to an invitation to submit a full proposal in the second phase of the competition, additional information will be required not only about a project’s link to policy, but also how the results will be communicated to policymakers and can be used in the policy process.

2. Research abstracts should also state the desired terms of the grant.

   1. The Foundation will consider supporting studies of one-, two-, or three-year duration.
   2. The summary should indicate total budget and project term requested and desired allocation of grant payments over that term. No detailed line-item budget is required at this time.
   3. The total cost to the Foundation over the project term may not exceed $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. Individuals can only submit or participate in a single proposal.

4. Research abstracts should be submitted by e-mail to housingmatters@macfound.org with the subject line “HHM Proposal.”

   1. Abstracts must be attached to the email, in Microsoft Word.
   2. The e-mail text must include a preferred contact’s full name, title, institution, address, and telephone/fax numbers.

   NOTE: The Foundation will use the email address from the submission and the contact information for all communications dealing with the competition. Only one preferred contact may be provided for each research summary submitted.

5. Applicants will be notified whether they have been selected to submit a full proposal no later than May 17, 2010. Applicants will be notified of the Foundation’s decision via the email address provided from the research abstract submission.
6. Complete proposals must be received by the Foundation by 11:59 p.m. Central Standard Time, July 2, 2010. Further guidelines and required supplementary materials will be provided to successful applicants who are invited to submit full proposals through the Foundation's RFP process, including transmittal instructions. All RFP responses will be subject to an external peer review process.

Who Is Eligible to Apply?

Applicants must be affiliated with a nonprofit 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. U.S. and non-U.S. citizens are eligible to apply, as are studies by non-U.S. based researchers and that deal with non-U.S.-based housing-family and community linkages, as long as they meet all program guidelines. Units of government are also eligible to apply for a grant as long as such entities are permitted by their applicable law to receive a grant. Previous award winners are eligible to apply.

Frequently Asked Questions

The following FAQ contains responses to questions we received from applicants regarding the full proposal phase of How Housing Matters. This FAQ was updated and mailed to applicants on June 8, 2010.

1. Question: Does the 25 page limit apply to single-spaced pages?

   Answer: Yes, please limit the total proposal narrative (Sections A-H) to 25 single-spaced pages, 1 inch margins, 12 point, Times New Roman font.

2. Question: In discussing the specific policy implications the research may have and given the page limits, should the proposal prioritize housing policies over other policies (of, e.g., education officials), or prioritize any particular level of government?

   Answer: One of the essential aims of the competition is to show how housing policy is connected to other social and economic policies, and explore how more integrated policy decision-making could improve both housing and non-housing outcomes. As the RFP requests, the research is to explore a relationship between housing and non-housing outcomes, and thus the expectation is that the proposals will address the appropriate level of government that could consume and act on the research results as well as the various policies that the results will most directly inform.

3. Question: If the applicant organization is not affiliated with an academic institution and does not receive federal grant monies, is it subject to an Institution Review Board (IRB) review and approval?

   Answer: If there are privacy and confidentiality issues associated with the applicant’s research data, or if primary data are to be collected through survey research or other methods that are subject to federal protections of human subjects, we expect applicants to present a plan for bringing the project before an appropriate IRB for review and approval. Such review and approval could be done by its own institution’s IRB or by contracting with an institution that will serve as applicant’s IRB. At this stage of the proposal process it is not necessary for an applicant to have already achieved IRB approval, rather to demonstrate its ability to seek review and achieve approval, if it is necessary.

4. Question: Must Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval of the research proposal come from the institution the principal investigator (“PI”) will be residing at during the duration of the grant award period, beginning in 2011?

   Answer: If the grantee institution through which the PI’s work will be funded will accept the IRB approval of another institution to which the PI may have previously received approval, the Foundation will need written acknowledgment of that. If that institution will not accept the prior IRB approval, the PI would need to seek the approval of his/her current grantee institution’s IRB.

5. Question: Any work addressing public policy issues over a three-year period must adapt to changes in the political, economic and social spheres in order to be effective. Assuming that our overall goals will remain constant, will there be an opportunity to adjust multi-year proposals to adapt to a changing policy environment?

   Answer: The Foundation recognizes that the policy environment within which research is received is dynamic. However, we do expect proposals to discuss the potential for shifts in the policy environment, thereby demonstrating an awareness of the policy context, as well as discuss how applicants might adapt to such shifts.

6. Question: The guidelines ask for applicants to submit a copy of our annual operating budget for the current year as well as for the duration of the grant if we are seeking multi-year funding. Our institution’s FY 2011 budget is being finalized and do not anticipate having any operating budgets beyond FY 2011. How will this be addressed?

   Answer: The Foundation recognizes that many institutions may not have operating budgets two to three years out. We ask that the applicant provide them if they are available.

Please note: If necessary, Foundation staff may contact applicants for clarification about their proposal package and/or to ensure delivery of supplementary material needed to make final funding recommendations.

Updated June 18, 2010