DeKalb County Comprehensive Housing Plan

Project Background

DeKalb County is creating its first-ever Comprehensive Housing Plan to serve as a blueprint for addressing housing challenges across the community. The Comprehensive Housing Plan will address housing affordability, supply, and preservation needs to identify strategies that can alleviate housing pressures for existing residents and attract new residents to the county.

Here’s How You Can Help!

Robust community input, as well as cross-sector collaboration amongst public and private stakeholders, is crucial to ensure that the planning process and outcomes are informed by local expertise and leverage local resources. See how you can get involved below!

• Community Conversations: Review the results of March's Community Conversations! See Community Conversations for more information.
• Public Events: Attend a public meeting or pop-up event in your area to speak with the project team directly! See Upcoming Engagement Opportunities below to learn when we will be in your neighborhood.

Community Conversations

DeKalb County hosted Community Conversations events across the county to collect public input during March 2026 for its first-ever Comprehensive Housing Plan! 135 residents and stakeholders attended the five meetings in this series to provide crucial insights on the state of DeKalb County’s housing ecosystem and their priorities for the County. Five major takeaways can be synthesized from the results of activities and conversations held during these events:

1. Top priority for residents is reducing housing cost burdens, followed by preserving existing affordable housing.
2. "No quality homes in my price range" and “desired housing types are not available" were the most frequently cited as barriers to buying and renting housing, respectively.
3. Residents prefer single-family housing over other housing types, but are open to duplexes, quadplexes, and similar small-scale multifamily options.
4. Attendees most frequently cited school quality as the major driving factor influencing where they choose to live other than cost.
5. Residents want more investment in strategies that will develop homes affordable to buy for households making less than $100,000 a year.

Other comments from attendees reflect a desire for more wheelchair accessible single-family and small-multifamily housing options, smaller housing types (i.e. cottages, ADUs, tiny houses) particularly for seniors, and sustainable transitional homes for unhoused residents or those undergoing other personal crises (e.g. mental instability, abusive households, etc.). To view the detailed breakdown of the results from each of our engagement activities, please visit the following link and peruse the tabs to navigate to the item you are most interested in: https://engagesycamore.mysocialpinpoint.com/DCCHP.

Upcoming Engagement Opportunities

We need your help to improve housing in DeKalb County! Please check back soon to see how you can participate in this important process this Summer.

Process & Timeline

• Project Initiation: October 2025
• Research & Analysis: November 2025 - April 2026
• Community Visioning: January - March 2026
• Plan Development and Review: May 2026 - October 2026
• Adoption: October 2026