A housing strategy is a plan that involves a variety of methods or a series of maneuvers designed with the purpose of building a housing plan.
What one needs to know is that creating a good strategy implies to subordonate the efforts to a series of goals and objectives. Otherwise, the process can end up with no results. As a reference source (An Affordable Housing Strategy for Stamford) points out, each participant has to have a certain role. This way, the task is approached in a comprehensive way.
Needless to say that, due to the complexity of modern day communities, there isn't a single option when it comes to such a strategy.
In order to elaborate a comprehensive housing strategy, one has to gather all the separate housing policies and draw the essentials that apply to a more general framework, appliable to a whole community.
Thus, the strategy will have an integrated body, approaching more aspects than an individual housing plan does.
In general, the main aspects dealt with are housing supply, affordability and quality to guarantee that persons of all income levels can afford and have access to it.
Hence, here are the four major steps that a good comprehensive housing strategy should involve:
1. Resort to the services of multiple agencies and include numerous stakeholders (the persons interested in building a house). As the saying goes “the more, the merrier”. This way, the roles are better distributed. The larger the number of the stakeholders is, the more ideas and information are given.
This input is shared among the agencies, whose collaboration allows to tackle with the challenges of community housing from more points of view. An important thing to do is to ensure from the beginning the involvement of various government agencies.
2. Setting the goals is the next stage in creating a strategy. An organized scheme of housing supposes to pinpoint the community's problems that need to be solved and to trace their causes. These will be analyzed taking into consideration the community's needs.
Therefore, the stakeholders should meet and draw the outline of their essential requirements and some reference points to measure progress toward their fulfilling.
3. This step implies to analyze and unite the versions of the housing programs proposed in order to obtain a final, unitary strategy. After evaluating the community's needs and making a list of objectives, various alternatives of housing strategies are put forward.
This process takes place through consultations between stakeholders and the representatives of the government agencies. Best practices are chosen and prepared for implementation.
4. The last step needs the use of a strict timeline, with clear benchmarks to follow the evolution of the process and also the responsibilities for each participant. This platform allows the officials and stakeholders to monitor the implementation so that the community goals are met.
After following these four steps, the result needs adjusmtents, financing, implementation and monitoring.
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