Project Overview: Building the Data Foundation for Housing Justice

This project represents a collaboration between two organizations: Front Step Community Land Trust - a collective of neighbors building community power, thriving neighborhoods, and affordable homes - and Impactful Insights, a data consultancy that helps nonprofits understand community needs and translate findings into clear, actionable narratives.

Together, Front Step and Impactful Insights designed a community-led renter survey to generate the data needed to drive anti-displacement policy, tenant protections, and cooperative housing expansion for Missoula renters. The survey reached over 1,000 current and former renters through direct mail, door-to-door canvassing, community tabling, and partner outreach.

Impactful Insights transformed the resulting dataset into a comprehensive analysis, with findings that confirmed the urgency of the moment - widespread cost burden, significant displacement risk, and persistent equity gaps for marginalized renters - while surfacing opportunities for advocacy and expanded pathways to homeownership. The data is being put to work by a broad coalition of partners to drive policy change and support renters in a challenging market.

The Data Gap Behind Missoula's Housing Crisis

Missoula renters are navigating a housing market defined by limited supply, rising costs, and significant barriers to finding and keeping stable housing. Housing instability in Missoula’s working-class neighborhoods is accelerating, with rising evictions, displacement, and speculative investor activity. 

The urgent question: how might we build resident-led data capacity to drive policy change before further loss of affordability?

With support from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, Front Step set out to address a clear gap: the lack of neighborhood-level housing data needed to inform and drive anti-displacement policy, tenant protections, and cooperative housing expansion in Missoula, with a focus on Missoula’s Invest Health neighborhoods (Franklin to the Fort, Northside/Westside, and River Road). 

The project aimed to surface what structural housing inequities renters face, how those inequities disproportionately affect marginalized residents, and what policies and supports could prevent displacement and expand community ownership.

Beyond collecting the data, the team set out with a goal of translating community-led research into insights rigorous enough to support policy change, yet clear and human enough to build public understanding, trust, and grassroots momentum.

Community-Led Research 

Impactful Insights worked with Front Step to define clear learning objectives from the start, centering the work on affordability, structural housing inequities, and what policies and supports could prevent displacement and expand community ownership. This early alignment shaped the design of a robust, community-centered survey that captured nuanced data in a form that was analytically useful. 

Front Step trained canvassers to administer the survey, and from January through April 2026, the team reached renters through a combination of direct mail (approximately 5,000 mailers), door-to-door canvassing (approximately 3,300 homes), community tabling, and partner outreach. The result was 1,091 responses from current and former renters - a rich but complex dataset spanning dozens of questions, demographic breakdowns, and pages of open-ended feedback.

Impactful Insights led the data processing and analysis, transforming a large and complex dataset into clear, actionable insights. The analysis examined sub-populations who may be marginalized or face unique challenges as renters in Missoula, using statistical testing to identify meaningful differences across groups, and drawing on renter quotes to ground the data in real voices.

Analytical results were translated into resources Front Step and its partners could put to work immediately:

• A comprehensive internal results deck organizing findings by topic - renter characteristics, affordability, moving and displacement, tenant-landlord relationships, and awareness and usage of community resources.  

• A concise external summary deck distilling the most important findings for public audiences, partner organizations, and policymakers.

• Supporting resources, including summaries of open-text comments, giving Front Step's team a foundation to keep drawing on the data beyond the initial deliverables.

Throughout, the analysis surfaced not just findings but actionable takeaways in formats designed to directly inform policy, advocacy, and communications work.

Renter Voices Highlight Key Challenges and Opportunities

Study findings painted a clear and urgent picture of Missoula's rental landscape. Over half of renters surveyed are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, and most renters report that if forced to move unexpectedly, they would likely go into debt or experience a gap in housing.

The renters most at risk are those with the fewest resources to absorb disruption. Students, retired renters, and those with disabilities are disproportionately represented in lower income ranges which face the greatest displacement risk. These same groups show the largest gaps in awareness of housing resources - particularly around affordable housing and homeownership support.

While most renters report adequate housing and generally positive landlord relationships, meaningful equity gaps persist. LGBTQIA+ renters, renters with disabilities, and renters of color experience discrimination, negative landlord relationships, and fear of retaliation at higher rates. Renters with accessibility needs are overwhelmingly low income and face challenges in securing accessible housing.

Despite these challenges, the survey also surfaces opportunities. Renters are engaged, informed, and specific about key needs; including financial assistance, deposit reform, stronger tenant rights education, and pathways to homeownership. Missoula has a strong network of housing resources, and the data highlights areas housing-focused organizations like Front Step can have the greatest impact: advocating for policies that better support renters, closing awareness gaps among those most at risk, strengthening tenants rights and legal support, and continuing to build pathways to stable, affordable, long-term housing.

Putting Findings to Work

For Front Step and other community partners, the project turned community-led research into a shared, evidence-based foundation - strengthening the case for specific policy priorities including Tenant Right to Counsel, Community and Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Acts, and the expansion of cooperative and resident-owned housing. The findings also highlighted renters' strong interest in pathways to homeownership, directly reinforcing the case for Front Step's community land trust model.

The data is designed to fuel action across Missoula's housing and health ecosystem - informing housing policy at the City of Missoula, advancing Right to Counsel with the Missoula Tenants Union, growing cooperative housing options with Front Step and NeighborWorks Montana, and integrating housing stability into the Missoula Invest Health Team's broader public health strategy. Neighborhood and advocacy groups will also draw on findings to mobilize grassroots action.

For Missoula renters, the project created a structured, resident-led channel for their experiences to be heard and documented, putting community data directly in the hands of the advocates and policymakers working to shape Missoula's housing future.