Housing authorities and community-based organizations invest significant time and resources in connecting people with services that can improve their lives. Yet one fundamental question remains unanswered:
How many residents and community members actually know those services exist—and know how to access them?
No nationally representative study has measured the percentage of housing authority residents or CBO community members who know what services are available to them or how to access them.
That absence is itself meaningful. It suggests the question has not been asked at scale, likely because the infrastructure required to ask it reliably does not consistently exist.
Two things are well documented. First, HUD’s own guidance on PHA-workforce partnerships identifies resident unawareness as a named structural barrier, stating directly that “public housing residents may not be utilizing resources because they are unaware of them or because they have misconceptions about them.”1
This isn’t an assumption buried in an academic abstract. It appears in a federal policy toolkit designed to help housing authorities and workforce boards build outreach programs specifically because the existing ones weren’t reaching residents.
Second, the connective tissue meant to close that gap is itself inconsistent. A Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies study found that while many HUD properties employ a service coordinator, the role is not universally adopted, is inconsistently funded, and its impacts on residents are not well understood.2 HUD-funded properties are not mandated to employ one at all.
Taken together, these two findings suggest that the primary mechanism for connecting residents to services is optional and unevenly deployed, and the federal government has acknowledged, in its own operational guidance, that residents frequently don’t know what’s available to them as a result.
"You can't measure awareness if you don't have a reliable way to reach people in the first place."
What no one has done is measure the scale of that gap at the national level. No study has asked a representative sample of public housing residents or CBO community members: What services does your organization offer, and do you know how to access them? The question hasn’t been answered because the infrastructure to ask it, a reliable direct channel to members, doesn’t consistently exist.
That gap has consequences. When members don’t know what’s available, services go underutilized, and the data needed to justify program investment gets harder to produce. For housing authority executives and CBO directors, that is not a peripheral concern. It sits directly in the path of funding renewals, board accountability, and the ability to demonstrate impact at scale.
That channel already exists in the pockets of the people these organizations serve. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2025 Mobile Fact Sheet, 91% of U.S. adults own a smartphone, and lower-income Americans are disproportionately likely to rely on it as their only means of internet access.³
"For a significant portion of the residents and community members these organizations serve, mobile is not one channel among many. It is the channel."
Building a communication strategy around that reality is not a technology decision. It is an operational one.3
For housing authority leaders and CBO directors, the question is no longer whether mobile belongs in the communication strategy. It is whether the organization has built the infrastructure to use it deliberately, consistently, and at the scale their communities require.
[1]U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development / U.S. Department of Labor. From the Ground Up: Creating Sustainable Partnerships between Public Housing Authorities and Workforce Investment Boards. Spring 2014. https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/14_dol_publication.pdf
[2]Scheckler, S. & Molinsky, J. Service Coordination in HUD Housing During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2022. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/research/files/harvard_jchs_service_coordination_scheckler_molinsky_2022.pdf
[3]Pew Research Center. Mobile Fact Sheet. November 20, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/