The Seattle Housing Affordability Dashboard is an interactive project that looks at rent burden, household income, and Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) zoning in Seattle from 2006 to 2022. By combining a map with linked charts, the dashboard helps users explore how housing affordability changes across time, neighborhoods, and demographic groups.
Instead of only showing numbers in a table, this project makes it easier to see where housing challenges are more concentrated and how those patterns connect to broader growth and policy changes in the city.
The goal of this project is to better understand where renter cost burden is most concentrated in Seattle and how it relates to income and MHA zoning patterns. Through interactive visualization, users can compare rent burden across years, demographic groups, and neighborhoods while also seeing the larger spatial patterns across the city.
When working with housing and demographic data, it is important to think carefully about how the information is presented. Maps and visualizations can shape how people understand neighborhoods, so this project aims to focus on broader structural patterns rather than judging or labeling specific communities. The purpose of the dashboard is to encourage understanding of housing affordability challenges in Seattle in a way that is thoughtful and responsible.
Although the datasets used in this project provide useful insight, they do not capture every part of people's housing experiences. Conditions can vary within neighborhoods, and factors such as displacement, housing quality, and personal financial circumstances are harder to represent in one dashboard. Because of this, the visualizations should be understood as general patterns rather than exact descriptions of every renter's experience.