In the history of the Division of Housing was a guidebook that had become severely outdated, the Affordable Housing Guide for Local Officials. It was an incredibly useful tool, so useful that despite it being last updated in 2007 local government leadership were still using it in 2017. On a trip around the state of Colorado, our housing director observed several communities referring to the information and when she returned we knew it was a priority to update.
I lead the project with a writer and editor and we completed it in an iterative, agile-like way before finishing on the 7th iteration with a new sequencing of information, complete rewrites of the majority of content, and a layout that felt user-friendly. The guide was printed and distributed, as well as becoming a searchable webpage using Gitbook. Our biggest challenge was updating the content from 2007 to 2017 without having a draft from between those years. The policies and land-use guidelines had gone through many changes in that decade and led to us having to completely redo entire sections of the guide. The project took 2 months to complete and is still is use today.
