What is NSPIRE?

NSPIRE – the National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate – is the new physical inspection model designed to promote HUD’s goal of reducing health and safety hazards in the home. To achieve this goal, NSPIRE prioritizes the condition of dwelling units—where people live. NSPIRE aligns multiple HUD programs to a single set of inspection standards so that the same expectations of housing quality can be achieved across HUD programs. NSPIRE introduces a new, innovative approach for developing, updating, and adapting standards and scoring based on continuous learning and improvement. To develop NSPIRE, HUD is collaborating with a diverse group of stakeholders, including property owners and managers, public housing agencies, public health and public safety professionals, and resident groups, who are providing critical input to the standards, processes, and protocols. These aspects of NSPIRE are being tested at volunteer properties throughout the two-year NSPIRE Demonstration, currently in progress, with feedback from inspectors and properties used to update and refine the inspection model. NSPIRE is also being updated using data gathered from a concurrent demonstration that HUD is conducting for the Housing Choice Voucher program. Both demonstrations reflect HUD’s congressional mandate to implement a single inspection protocol for public housing and voucher units. Under NSPIRE, HUD plans to leverage inspection data, lessons learned, and stakeholder feedback to update standards and scoring at least every three years. NSPIRE makes key improvements to inspections to increase their objectivity, accuracy, and consistency. Under NSPIRE, inspections are based on deficiency indicators to ensure deficiencies cited by inspectors accurately reflect substandard conditions within a property. Each inspection standard is supported by a rationale, which is a clear and concise explanation of the potential risk a defect presents.