Interview with the Head Statistician at HUD
With the January 2019 enactment of the Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (to be referred to as the evidence act here), every federal department and agency is required to have a statistics official who, among other responsibilities, represent the department/agency to the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy (ICSP), headed by the chief statistician of the US. Just as the ASA has been profiling ICSP federal statistical agency heads for many years, we now welcome new ICSP members to the federal statistical community.
Tell us more about your office.
My office’s mission is to provide the public with timely data about the housing market, focusing on housing conditions and production. To carry out that mission, my office oversees HUD’s housing market surveys programs, including the American Housing Survey, the Rental Housing Finance Survey, and the Survey of Construction.
The bulk of the $41 million annual funding for HUD’s housing market surveys program is provided to the US Census Bureau, which is responsible for data collection and most survey operations. My HUD team works with the Census Bureau to ensure we produce timely and accurate housing market data used by other federal agencies, local and state governments, housing trade associations, housing and community advocacy organizations, and academic and nonacademic researchers.
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