Rural Housing Playbook

The Rural Housing Collaborative (the “Collaborative”) is a group of individuals and organizations including resource providers, housing and community development practitioners and others with expertise and an interest in bringing housing development solutions to rural South Dakota communities.  The Collaborative produced this Rural Housing Playbook to present a way to make it easier for rural communities to develop housing, and to make it easier for resource providers to work with them and with each other.

The Collaborative conducted research to determine rural SD communities’ needs with respect to the housing development process. The research was pretty extensive: more than 65 communities completed surveys or participated in interviews.  They discussed programs they had heard about or used.  They hosted site visits from Rural Housing Collaborative members.  The South Dakota Rural Development Council conducted 30 community assessments from 2004-2007.  The Rural Learning Center and the American Institute of Architects--South Dakota conducted community design charrettes, helping communities identify and articulate a vision of what they want their communities to look like.  The Collaborative used information from all of these efforts to create the Rural Housing Playbook.

The Playbook is a housing development process manual intended to help accomplish four main goals:

1. To enhance the distribution of housing information and analysis by gathering and sharing best practices and other information;
2. To establish housing as a rural development strategy and to encourage broad community support for approaching housing and community development as an important economic development tool;
3. To remove housing program delivery barriers like communities’ lack of knowledge about:

4. To improve the delivery of housing technical assistance by establishing better connections among communities, between communities and resource providers, and among resource providers themselves.