HUD's Community 2020

Journal of Real Estate Literature, 6: 147150 (1998) 1998 American Real Estate Society GRANT IAN THRALL Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville FL 32611, Thrall@geog.ufl.eduSTEPHEN M. GOLANT Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville FL 32611, Golant@geog.ufl.eduHUD Community Planning Software (HUDCPS), also referred to as HUD 2020 (coproduced by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD, Washington, DC) and Caliper Corporation (Newton, MA), telephone 800-998-9999 (request product sales), website (http://www.caliper.com/gishud.htm or http://www.hud.gov/cpd/2020soft.html) is a full-featured desktop GIS software program based on Calipers Maptitude version 3.0 GIS software with a customized user interface and automated thematic mapping using data from HUD. HUDCPS runs under Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0. HUDCPS requires an 80486 or Pentium-based computer equipped with a minimum of 12MB of RAM and a CD-ROM drive. Price is $249 with choice of HUD data from one of four (eastern, southern, central, and western) regions of the United States or $299 for HUD data from all four U.S. Census regions. It includes U.S. national TIGER/ Line data sets (census tracts and block groups, streets, highways, landmarks, water areas) and attribute data (housing and population data from the 1990 U.S. Census).=====Public real estate has not received the attention that it fully deserves. How does federal funding of various kinds of housing and commercial developments affect real estate markets? How does government direct purchase of private land affect real estate markets? What criteria should be used by governments at the federal, state, or local level in their decisions to fund public developments including the outright purchase land (Thrall and McCartney, 1991)?The largest government programs to house low-income households are administrated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The evaluation of the supply of urban housing in this price category must take into consideration HUD programs. Academic researchers and practitioner analysts who have experience with housing in the lower price categories have experience with HUDs programs and the data on those programs available from HUD (on specific issues that affect the housing the elderly, see Golant, 1992). For many, acquisition of information on HUD programs and accessing HUD housing data have been fraught with difficulty. It will come as good news for these researchers and analysts that with these data and software product, HUD has taken a bold step toward ameliorating this problem. This product is HUDs first step toward taking the pain out of low-income housing data acquisition, as well as removing much of the difficulty faced by new users of GIS software.It is a common adage that geographic information systems (GIS) is a tight integration of: Software, Data, Analysis, Hardware, and Personnel.HUDs Community 2020148 GRANT IAN THRALL AND STEPHEN M. GOLANTThe Journal of Real Estate Literature has dealt with several of the above points. Several articles have been published on how GIS technology can contribute to real estate research and analysis (Thrall and Marks, 1993; Wofford and Thrall, 1997; see also Clapp, Rodriguez; and Thrall, 1997). An article has been published on the pitfalls that a real estate analyst can succumb to when applying geographic reasoning (Thrall, 1998). In addition, the journal has published a comparison of GIS software (Marks, Stanley, and Thrall, 1994). As the technology has developed, software designers and data providers have expended considerable effort to make their products more widely accessible and user friendly. …