Commerce released the final version of the Racially Disparate Impacts (RDI) Guidance document (“RDI Guidance”) in April 2023. The RDI Guidance offers recommendations on how your housing element might be updated to address new GMA requirements regarding racially disparate impacts, displacement, exclusion and displacement risk (RCW 36.70A.070(2)(e-h)).
The RDI Guidance recommends that the housing element update process include, among other items, an evaluation of data and policies, as well as community engagement. To assist local jurisdictions on the data evaluation component, Commerce teamed with a consultant to prepare a Racially Disparate Impact (RDI) Data Toolkit. This RDI Data Toolkit provides local jurisdictions with a base level of data to use in your analysis, particularly in identifying racially disparate impacts and exclusion.
Information on the following data parameters are available in the RDI Data Toolkit (whichincludes comparative data for your respective county):
Racial composition (2015 and 2020)
Cost burden by race and tenure (2019)
Rental housing affordability by income categories (2019)
Households by income and race (2019)
Owner and renter households by racial group (2019)
Before using the RDI Data Toolkit, please review the “Readme” Tab, which discusses how to use the tables and provides additional background about the data. You are, of course, welcome to supplement the RDI Toolkit Data with other data sources. The RDI Guidance identifies additional data sources that may be helpful in your evaluation of racially disparate impacts, exclusion, displacement and in identifying places at high risk of displacement.
At this time, the RDI Data Toolkits are being released on a rolling basis based on the periodic update schedule. As of November 2023, data is available for jurisdictions completing periodic updates by 2024 and 2025. Similar information will soon be provided for jurisdictions completing periodic updates in 2026 and 2027. If you are a 2026 or 2027 jurisdiction and would like your jurisdiction's data before it is published, please contact Laura Hodgson at laura.hodgson@commerce.wa.gov.
Should you have questions, including if you have difficulty accessing the data, please contact Laura Hodgson at laura.hodgson@commerce.wa.gov.
Please see the pages under the "RDI Data Toolkit" tab for this data.
