HPD Fair Housing Community Engagement

Advancing fair housing through inclusive community engagement

TYTHEdesign partnered with the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to support the public engagement process for the Where We Live NYC 2025 plan–an initiative to advance fair housing across New York City. The goal was to gather meaningful, community-driven insights about New Yorkers’ lived experiences with housing, discrimination, and neighborhood access and to ensure these perspectives help shape the City’s updated fair housing strategies.

In collaboration with Equitable Neighborhood Initiatives at HPD, TYTHE crafted and executed an inclusive engagement strategy rooted in equity, accessibility, and trust-building. By prioritizing transparency and creating multiple pathways for participation, TYTHE aimed to help HPD gather personal, nuanced feedback from a broad cross-section of New Yorkers–particularly those from New York State and City’s protected classes, such as voucher holders, immigrants, and individuals with disabilities.

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OUR STRATEGY

To ensure alignment across HPD, we co-designed an engagement plan that set goals, defined success, outlined project outcomes, and laid out a distinct data collection plan. In addition to co-designing public workshops, we developed an outreach plan and materials to support the HPD team in their efforts to engage a wide swath of New Yorkers. By reviewing the existing Where We Live NYC plan, we were able to identify target audiences and communities whose voices we wanted to amplify in the data collection phase.

Key engagement tactics for the Where We Live NYC 2025 update included three public, in-person workshops designed to be welcoming, accessible, and informative. Each session began with a plain-language overview of the planning process and goals, followed by interactive activities–such as experience mapping, barrier identification, and solution co-design–led by TYTHE and HPD facilitators. The engagement process prioritized inclusivity through language access, digital accessibility, and participant comfort, using multi-format tools like open-ended questionnaires, sticker voting, and facilitated discussions to gather meaningful input and advance equity.

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THE OUTCOME

TYTHEdesign’s process, in collaboration with HPD, led to the collection of community-informed insights pulled from residents across all five boroughs to help shape the City’s 2025 fair housing plan. By prioritizing depth over volume–instead of focusing on metrics alone–TYTHE emphasized the quality of insights, capturing the lived realities of New Yorkers across geography, language, and ability. These insights, in addition to those collected from previous HPD community engagements, were captured in a Findings Report for the HPD to incorporate into the Where We Live NYC 2025 plan, to be released in the fall of 2025.

Client: NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Fair Housing Community Engagement

Collaborators: Kristina Drury, Aliza Sarian, and Hans Callenbach

Year: 2025