photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024.

As part of a City of Lawrence study about housing affordability and “COVID’s impact on the housing market,” you can now take an online survey that asks plenty of questions about your housing – but no questions about COVID.

If you’re wondering why that is, city officials and consultants say there’s a good reason for the study to have a COVID angle, and it’s not just that it’s funded with a federal grant that’s specifically for COVID-related projects.

The bigger picture, they say, is that the pandemic dramatically changed the housing landscape and left the city’s last housing market study, from 2018, sorely in need of an update.

“We need to look at COVID impacts on housing; that’s part of what the grant that’s funding the study requires, asks us to do,” consultant Andy Pfister of Development Strategies told the Affordable Housing Advisory Board at a meeting in December. “And there are some significant impacts. We’ve seen a lot of changes nationally and locally in the last five years.”

Bid documents from mid-2025 show that Development Strategies is being paid just under $100,000 for the study, and Affordable Housing Administrator Lea Roselyn said that money is entirely from a “COVID-specific” grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It began last year with listening sessions for stakeholder groups, and the survey that the city announced this week is moving it into a new phase.

This study is intended to take a more in-depth look at the city’s housing needs to update the 2018 housing market analysis, which was done by a different consulting firm. The city and county plan for ending chronic homelessness, A Place for Everyone, was informed by that analysis, and city spokeswoman Cori Wallace said a fresh look at the housing market after COVID would help the plan adapt to current conditions.

“Here’s the reason why we’re doing this now: an updated study allows us to continue to work within the A Place for Everyone Plan and to take into consideration the shifts and changes in the market since the pandemic,” Wallace said in an email to the Journal-World.

Growing challenges

Back when the proposal for the study was first being discussed by AHAB in 2024, member Mark Buhler had wondered whether conditions were really different enough to warrant it.

What are we likely to learn for $100,000 that we don’t already know?” Buhler asked back in April 2024. “I know things have changed. (The) pandemic, I guess, has passed. It just kind of feels like it’s going to tell us it’s as bad or worse, and our goals are still the same.”

More than a year later, in December 2025, Pfister did say that many of the challenges in housing since COVID aren’t new. But he also said that those challenges had grown rapidly during the pandemic.

“COVID didn’t change the challenges we have around housing,” Pfister said. “It exacerbated them very quickly and brought a lot of challenges really to the forefront for those who had never experienced them before.”

In the December meeting, Pfister pointed to a few specific things that had changed in Lawrence’s housing market since before the pandemic. One of the biggest issues, he said, was that incomes had been stagnant while home prices had risen.

Buhler, during the discussion at that meeting, said that was a goal that the community could pursue – building wealth, bringing in better jobs and encouraging homeownership.

“I think a lot of people don’t think housing is affordable for them because of the dynamics they’ve been living with for the last few years, and I think we can change them,” Buhler said.

The board came up with a list of other challenges that Lawrence faced, including misconceptions and stereotypes about what affordable housing is, a need for supportive services for people moving into housing and more.

And they also wanted to explore the more practical problems of creating new housing, such as how to open up developable land, how to get private-sector developers more involved, and what kinds of projects would make the most difference.

“We can’t fund everything; that’s the reality,” said AHAB member Monte Soukup. “Let’s fund the things that have the most impact on the people and the populations that we want to impact.”

The survey

Issues like what kinds of projects the city most needed and who was most in need of help were explored in the 2018 study, which was done by a different consulting firm, BBC Research & Consulting.

This study focused on analyzing the housing and rental markets and found that thousands of renters in Lawrence were spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. It also found broad support for more diverse housing stock in Lawrence, including smaller homes and townhomes.

The new survey doesn’t ask any questions at all about COVID. Neither does it focus on changes that renters or residents have experienced over the past several years, although it does ask how long they’ve been in their current housing.

But it does ask a lot of questions about your experience finding and paying for housing in Lawrence.

What you will find in the survey are questions about what kind of housing you live in and in what part of the city; whether you’ve had difficulty finding housing that you can access and afford; how close your housing is to work, school and amenities; and whether you’ve experienced safety problems such as water damage, mold or electrical and plumbing issues.

If you’re a landlord, you’ll also be asked about how many units you rent out, how long they generally remain vacant and how much rent you charge on average. There are also questions about challenges landlords face with specific properties and with broader issues such as government regulations or property tax rates.

And some of the questions are about what could be done to improve housing in Lawrence, too. One of them asks about your “housing goals” and “what single thing would most help you achieve your goal?”

The survey, which can be accessed at surveymonkey.com/r/LawrenceHousingNeeds, closes on Feb. 27. After that, the consultants will be preparing a draft report and will have an open house later in the year to discuss the work with the public.

A timeline on the study website, housinglawrence.konveio.com, says the study’s final report should be done by June.