The article examines the difficulty of enumerating the number of federally subsidized housing units and provides a method of reconciling data sets at the parcel level to identify housing needs and rental stock.

The authors developed a primarily automated process to take the “city”-level dataset from the Picture of Subsidized Households (PSH), which corresponds to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Populated Place Areas, and reassemble it at the scale of a state’s municipalities.