How a university-county partnership changed the landscape of housing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg
By Bridget Anderson and Mary Ann Priester, Ph.D.
What gets measured, gets done.1
Today, with homelessness in Mecklenburg County rising and housing affordability threatening to push more families into impossible choices and greater instability, our community has access to extensive data and research because of a vision and partnership born over a decade ago. It’s easy to take for granted that it wasn’t too long ago that getting accurate, consistent information on homelessness and housing instability was challenging in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
This article reflects on the enduring partnership between the Charlotte Urban Institute and Mecklenburg County Community Support Services, which together, recently marked 10 years of advancing data-driven efforts to address housing instability and homelessness. As the formal project partnership comes to a close, this milestone offers an opportunity to look back on the impact of our shared work, the foundation it leaves for future progress, and the questions we must continue to ask ourselves to ensure data translates into action in people’s lives.
The partnership began through the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Coalition, later renamed the Housing Advisory Board of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, created as a joint task force among the City of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, and the private sector in 2010. Chaired by now Mayor Vi Lyles and Mike Rizer, now with Ally Bank, the Coalition focused early on measurement. Lori Thomas, Ph.D., now the executive director of the Charlotte Urban Institute + Regional Data Trust but then a full-time faculty member, was tapped to lead the Coalition’s research and evaluation committee and was charged with developing community wide metrics of success and ensuring that our community had the infrastructure and capacity to use data to drive decision-making.
“I remember thinking, Knoxville, Tennessee is a fraction of our size and has 3 full-time people managing their data and data infrastructure for homelessness and we don’t have one person whose full-time job is to address this,” Thomas recalls, “We were trying to do with volunteers and ‘other duties as assigned’ what other communities were doing with dedicated staff.” Thomas, Stacy Lowry, the County Director of Community Support Services (CSS), and other County and City staff members assigned to facilitate the Coalition began working closely to shift the Charlotte-Mecklenburg data landscape.
As the County added two key full-time positions to their staff – one to focus on “data in” and another to focus on “data out,” they also added regular funding into their annual budget to support regular data and reporting on homelessness. At UNC Charlotte, Thomas approached the Urban Institute and Institute for Social Capital (now named the Charlotte Regional Data Trust) about participating in the research the County needed, particularly with its capacity to link data across individuals who were being served by different sectors. In the midst of partnership conversations, the idea for a report series on housing instability and homelessness was born.
Initially, the annual series included a separate report on the point-in-time count, a state of homelessness and housing stability report, and an integrated data report. Between 2014 and 2025, the report series produced 22 unique publications addressing critical issues related to housing instability and homelessness.
One of the most enduring contributions of the partnership is the creation of the State of Housing Instability and Homelessness (SoHIH) report. Published annually, the SoHIH report delivers comprehensive updates on local housing instability and homelessness trends, drawing on data from the Point-in-Time count, federal sources, and local partners. From 2018 – 2021, the SoHIH report was researched and written by Institute staff with support annually by graduate research assistants. In 2022, the report was transitioned to the County, which had created additional research capacity around housing and homelessness.
In 2017, the Institute also worked with County staff to develop and incubate mecklenburghousingdata.org, a dynamic platform that features the county’s housing data dashboard, research findings, and an active blog—making data and insights accessible to the public and policymakers alike. In 2020, the website maintenance and ongoing development was transitioned to Mecklenburg County.
Since the beginning of the partnership, the series has highlighted emerging and urgent issues by using linked data from the Charlotte Regional Data Trust. The Data Trust, a community-university partnership and a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, links data on individuals across organizations and institutions, providing deidentified, integrated datasets to examine how people are served across systems and beyond organizational silos. The partnership put the Data Trust to work leading to actionable information for our community including:
- A study of family homelessness, that found that 38% of CMS students living in emergency shelters were not enrolled in McKinney-Vento services through the school system. Simply linking and describing the data across these two organizations led dedicated staffing at the shelter to ensure that every eligible child is enrolled in the services provided for them by federal law.
- A study examining the housing challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals found that those with a prior history of homelessness were 22 times more likely to experience homelessness again after exiting the justice system compared to those with no such history. The report highlighted a local cycle of homelessness and incarceration and the need for holistic reentry services. Reflecting on the report’s impact, Dr. Kenny Robinson, Founder and President of reentry organization Freedom Fighting Missionaries, shares, “The report [was] the single most important piece of data for our organization and led to us being awarded over $4 million dollars in government funding.”
Notably, the three-part Eviction Series that began in 2017, received national recognition from the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), an initiative of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., earning the G. Thomas Kingsley Impact Award. Among other impacts, Mecklenburg County allocated $300,000 to legal representation services for people facing eviction for the first time and Legal Aid of North Carolina developed a fact sheet on tenant rights to go with every eviction served.
As the annual report series formally comes to an end, the work and legacy of the partnership lives on—in the data infrastructure it built, the community dialogue it fostered, and the policies it helped shape. Reflecting on this legacy, Stacy Lowry, director of Mecklenburg County Community Support Services shares “I believe that the comprehensive reporting of SOHIH and the dashboard have influenced local efforts to address housing instability and homelessness by providing data to understand the scope and causes of homelessness, enabling more targeted interventions, and improving resource allocation for housing and services.”
From here, the County, the Institute + Data Trust, and the many partners who have worked with us for over a decade will continue the work around housing and homelessness, looking for new opportunities to turn data into actionable information and impact. “After a decade, and particularly at this moment when the current federal administration has called for vast changes in the funding of homeless services, the work transitions, but it doesn’t go away. We must continue to ask ourselves the hard question of how our work leads to tangible impact for people experiencing homelessness and generations of housing instability,” says Thomas. “In this critical time, we look forward to working alongside Mecklenburg County and other regional partners on research that matters.” The lessons learned, tools developed, and relationships formed over the past decade will continue to inform efforts to reduce housing instability and homelessness in Mecklenburg County and beyond.
1 Spellman, B. & Abbenante, M. (2008) What gets measured gets done: A toolkit on performance measurement for ending homelessness. National Alliance to End Homelessness, Washington, D.C.