Housing Stability & Economic Health & Mobility
Working session, June 9, 2026. Notes prepared by the Multifamily Impact Council.
What We Discussed
This was week two of the Framework Enhancement Initiative’s four week series building Framework 4.0, covering housing stability and economic health and mobility. Rachel walked through both definitions and thresholds, and members weighed in throughout: Shayna Dunitz pushed to track repeated late rent payments under 30 days as an early instability signal, not just the 30 day threshold itself, and the group discussed where the line sits between reportable framework metrics and softer impact guidance, including tracking move-out reasons, quantifying vacancy cost savings from improved retention, and using positive rent reporting data to show credit score gains tied to economic mobility.
Why It Matters
The conversation kept circling back to a harder question underneath all the individual metrics: are these programs actually working, or just present? Shayna named it directly when she described her organization’s move toward resident-led programming, elevating resident ambassadors to help decide what services actually get funded, precisely because it’s easy to run a program that people use without knowing if it moves anyone’s life forward. Jeffrey from Mercy Housing described a similar pivot already underway: consolidating 20 to 25 disparate resident offerings down to five or six evidence based ones, with a multi-year measurement plan built in from the start specifically to test causation, not just correlation. AJ Jackson’s read on economic mobility reinforced the same instinct from a different angle: his working hypothesis is that location plus resident connection, not any single service, is the real driver, which is why his portfolio mixes income levels intentionally rather than defaulting to a single service checklist.
Where We Go From Here
Several threads here are landing in the framework’s supporting impact guidance rather than the core metrics for now, days late tracking beyond the 30 day mark, move-out reason tracking, and dollarizing retention driven operating expense savings, because the data isn’t consistently reliable across members yet. Rachel flagged all three as strong candidates to promote once reporting quality catches up. On the outcomes question, Jeffrey offered to share what Mercy Housing learns from its three year evidence based pilot, and Shayna is looking to connect with anyone else wrestling with the same outputs versus outcomes measurement problem, including AJ, who offered to compare notes on his mixed income, resident-connection model even though he doesn’t expect public results for two to four years. If your organization is working on the same problem, distinguishing which resident services actually move outcomes rather than just get used, these three would be a good place to start comparing notes.
Continued Areas of Exploration
“One of the things I'm starting to think about now is the balance of outputs versus outcomes. We have a bunch of programs, people come to them, it's great, it's helpful. But is that really driving what we want?”
Shayna Dunitz, Texas Housing Conservancy
Meeting Recording
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