California Coalition for Rural Housing

Location:
Sacramento, CA

The California Coalition for Rural Housing is a statewide nonprofit organization that works to ensure affordable housing opportunities for low income households in California. Together with its strong base of supporters and programming:

The Coalition educates and encourages public support on a wide array of housing issues, focusing its efforts to promote and preserve affordable housing in rural California.
The Coalition is committed to livable and sustainable rural communities by asserting the importance of developing and preserving safe, healthy, and adequate housing as an integral part of the community infrastructure.
The Coalition is committed to smart growth land use principles, helping to ensure quality of life for families and their neighborhoods
The Coalition actively participates at all government levels in order to achieve policies for the production and preservation of affordable housing.

Supported Projects



Website and Database Building

Rebecca White
9/20069/2007

Goal 1: Increase the capacity of rural communities and the organizations that serve them to utlize new information technologies for community development endeavors.

Goal 2: Assist in maintaining and improving on organization’s technology capacity

Goal 3: Develop and maintain a housing policy clearinghouse and searchable database for communities and community based organizations that are looking to adopt policies that will increase the stock of decent affordable housing.

In February Cal Rural Housing completed working on a 3 month project with Fresno County Community Development Division in which we provided technical assistance in developing an electronic database to track their CDBG expenditures. The County had never tracked these expenditures other then in a word document. Rebecca inputted the information we obtained in a word document into Excel, analyzed, charted and developed maps for the department. We then provided maps for a presentation to the Board of Supervisors that shows expenditures by community and by district (attached). The County should now be able to more easily track Federal funding using this database and produce charts and map in a more timely fashion. Rebecca spent a majority of her time revamping our website and upgrading our Rural Toolbox. She upgraded our old site using Drupal and developed a searchable database of more than 130 California Inclusionary Housing programs, the first of its kind in the US. The database provides summaries of characteristics for each policy. Users are able to search for these summaries by jurisdiction name or by more than 30 other variables. Rebecca also developed an introductory tutorial on using open-source desktop GIS (MapWindow) that can be used as either a GIS viewer or an advanced should be live by August-September.




Transmission Project