Our team presented our Housing Needs Assessment for the Moline, Rock Island, & Davenport Consortium of Cities (the Tri-Cities) in January 2025. We partnered with Mosaic Community Planning for this project, and PC simultaneously helped Mosaic to perform an Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice. Both projects were designed to fully meet all HUD requirements.
The Tri-Cities face unique opportunities: decreasing population in two of the three cities has resulted in lower home prices compared to high-growth markets. Statistics on price and vacancies indicate that each of the cities has an ample inventory of units primed for reinvestment. To capitalize on this, our recommendations included city-specific tools available to preserve some of this inventory for long-term affordability.
Given the wide range of population projections, our forecast presented three scenarios for each city, designated as “status quo,” “moderate growth,” and “optimistic growth.” This resulted in a range of potential residential unit needs by 2044, summarized as follows:
- Davenport: between 4,490 and 8,706 units | 9.5% to 18.4% growth
- Rock Island: between 11 and 3,702 units | 0.1% to 21.3% growth
- Moline: between –1,130 and 4,380 units | -5.8% to 22.6% growth
Particular challenges of this assignment stemmed from the inherent multi-state and multi-city coordination, as well as differences in conciseness and type of data available for each municipality. We approached these setbacks by being collaborative and proactive with city officials and conducting extensive outreach to each community. Community engagement was conducted in tandem for both projects, and included on-site townhalls, a housing survey, and interviews of community leaders from all three cities.
Read the full report here:
