Letter From Co-Chairs

Last summer, we came together to launch the National Housing Crisis Task Force to give fellow state and local leaders the tools and resources to take urgent action to address the housing crisis. We launched this bipartisan, public-private sector partnership knowing innovative programs to boost housing supply and affordability existed in many communities and needed to be scaled quickly and nationally to have a meaningful impact on housing supply and production.

One year on, we are convinced that state and local governments have more power than they realize, more capital to deploy, and more capacity than previously utilized. State governments and their housing finance agencies regularly raise billions of dollars for housing development, housing preservation, and single-family mortgages through bond offerings. We hear from peers across the U.S. how local governments have created housing trust funds, new revolving loan funds, and new public development agencies. That community foundations and other philanthropies are investing in people, projects, and communities. And that state, county, and local governments are innovating to speed permitting and streamline zoning and other regulatory requirements.

Today, we are proud to introduce the Task Force’s State and Local Housing Action Plan, which profiles 15 tools from models of innovation around the country that show the promise to both scale and deliver more housing. The Action Plan highlights models that have the greatest potential to transform state and local housing ecosystems towards greater production and preservation at lower cost and greater speed.

The tools are categorized into the following thematic areas:

• Land interventions seek to ensure that publicly owned land is put in the service of housing production and preservation, and that private land owners have appropriate incentives to consider housing development.
• Construction interventions seek to reduce the cost of building and renovating housing.
• Capital interventions seek innovative capital stacks that enable more affordable housing.
• Regulation and Policy interventions reduce obstacles in the way of housing production through efforts such as land use, permitting, and building code reform.
• Governance interventions seek to build capacity for affordable housing at scale by forging greater collaboration across sectors and jurisdictions at the local and regional level.

The State and Local Housing Action Plan serves as both a guide so that communities can implement the tools in the Action Plan now and a roadmap to identify how these innovations can scale more rapidly in more places. Not every part of the State and Local Housing Action Plan will make sense in each jurisdiction, but as a whole, they offer a set of policies that will enable local and state leaders from both the public and private sectors to make meaningful progress on addressing the housing crisis. We are ever committed with the National Housing Crisis Task Force to uplift existing solutions and transform the existing system to help more of our citizens live in the places they want to call home.

Sincerely,