The original motivation for the surveys came from the post-riot commissions in the late 1960s (Kaiser Committee and the Douglas Commission). The organizing meeting for the AHS was held in June 1970 at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC. Participants included representatives of all the major domestic agencies, including all Cabinet agencies: Labor; Health, Education and Welfare; Agriculture; Commerce (DoC); and of course, Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The proposal for an annual survey of the nation's housing stock, and of at least sixty metropolitan areas, to provide needed housing data on which to base housing and community development policies and programs between the decennial censuses, was a joint proposal from the Housing Division of the Bureau of the Census, DoC, and the Office of Economic and Market Analysis, HUD, each of which had the approval of their respective cabinet secretaries.
Neither outside nor internal HUD data collection resources were seriously considered because only the Census Bureau had complete access to the confidential records of the decennial censuses from which the basic national and metropolitan samples were to be selected.
In addition, the Bureau controls the confidential records of the building permit, housing starts, and housing completions surveys, which were to be used to update the decennial census sample in permit-issuing areas. No other Federal agencies or outside, private, firms had the national resources or statistical and data processing capabilities to handle the amount of data expected to be collected.
For years, HUD had engaged the Census Bureau to collect housing production and marketing data to fill gaps in the housing statistical picture. In 1959, the HHFA, a HUD predecessor agency, commissioned the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect data on new home sales.
The work was transferred to the Census Bureau in 1963 because the data series fit nicely with the Construction Division's building permits and housing starts series. In 1968, the Housing Completions Survey, funded by HUD and administered by Census, was added to the New Home Sales Survey. In 1969, the Survey of Market Absorption of New Apartments piggybacked on the existing production and marketing surveys, but was carried out by the Census Housing Division instead of the Construction Division. In 1972, HUD sponsored and funded the Survey of New Mobile Home Placements, administered by the Census Construction Division. Given the firm working relationship between HUD and Census, Census was the obvious choice to conduct the AHS. The AHS, begun in 1973, is the most prominent in a line of HUD-funded and directed surveys conducted by the Census Bureau.
In 1970, OMB unanimously approved the HUD-Census proposal for the AHS and allocated adequate funds to the HUD research budget for transfer to Census to implement the survey.