Stephen Sills

The UNCG Center for Housing and Community Studies (CHCS) is a university-based research, evaluation, and technical assistance center. As part of our mission, we are committed to investigating and understanding how the social, economic, environmental, and spatial aspects of home and neighborhood affect people’s health, well-being, and life course.

We are actively engaged in funded studies of impediments to fair housing, continuum of care for the homeless, housing market trends and market segmentation studies, county and regional community planning, and studies of the impact of housing on health. CHCS staff have been working to identify substandard homes, weak housing markets, vacant and abandoned lots and buildings, systemic inequality, and other community conditions that impact the quality of life of residents. Recent projects include the use of advanced data visualization and mapping. We have conducted HUD Fair Housing Assessments and Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice, as well as paired-testing studies.

The work of the Center directly impacts the quality of life for the residents of North Carolina. Recent projects include:

• A multi-year formative/summative evaluation of a USDA Local Food Promotion Program developing food entrepreneurship in low-income communities; technical assistance to grantees in rural communities to address behavioral health disparities in opioid overdose prevention focusing on underserved Latino and African-American youth
• Development of neighborhood-level health indicators to guide and evaluate the impact of philanthropic projects for a local health foundation
• The design and implementation of an evaluation of a multi-year neighbor-based collective impact initiative to address diabetes and asthma (BUILD 2.0 Collaborative Cottage Grove).
• An oral history project on Latino/a immigrants living in peri-urban and rural mobile home communities
• A recent study of pediatric asthma in low-income neighborhoods using GIS analysis of hospital visits and housing assessments has led to over $4.5 million in neighborhood revitalization efforts
• We recently concluded a year-long Asset Based Community Development project with included a Community Action Plan for improving the quality of life in Southern Appalachia.
  
  

CHCS has been part of a “living laboratory” model of collaboration formalized in a partnership between UNCG and the Guilford County Government through the MetroLab Network.

This partnership has been used to identify community issues (including eviction and homelessness) that can be solved through innovative research, development, and deployment. Recently our Healthy Homes work was featured on PBS and our Tenant Leadership Academy was on NPR.