In 2021, Mosaic developed a Regional Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice for the St. Louis HOME Consortium, a group consisting of St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson County, the City of Florissant, the City of O’Fallon, and the Housing Authority of St. Louis County. The Consortium members work together to plan and allocate funding for affordable housing activities throughout the St. Louis region. These partners, and the communities they represent, are remarkably diverse, ranging from urban areas and aging inner-ring suburbs to affluent, rapidly-growing exurbs to rural communities many miles removed from St. Louis.
To design a housing study encompassing a single regional housing market, yet reflecting the unique characteristics of these varied communities, and containing actionable recommendations tailored to the resources and needs of the partnering jurisdictions required a multilateral project management approach. The resulting study included regional data and analysis throughout, but was careful to represent each of the consortium communities individually as well, allowing comparisons to one another, to the consortium as a whole, and to the greater St. Louis region. Individual executive summaries for each consortium community allowed policymakers, stakeholders, and interested residents to easily access data distilled especially for their geography of interest and to focus on impediments and strategies uniquely applicable to them, while the full study tied these pieces into a bigger picture of the entire region.