Executive Summary

State and local governments have more power than they might realize, more capital than is first apparent, and more capacity than they may have utilized in recent decades. State governments and their housing finance agencies regularly raise billions of dollars for housing development, housing preservation, and single-family mortgages through bond offerings. Local governments have created housing trust funds, new revolving loan funds, and new public development agencies. Community foundations and other philanthropies are investing in people, projects, and communities. While state and local zoning reforms have garnered the most attention, innovations to create faster, better, and more attainable housing have also occurred around land, construction, capital, regulation, and governance.

Housing development and preservation in the U.S. is a federated system. It is largely undergirded by the federal government. Institutions like the Federal Housing Administration, Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the Treasury Department set the baseline conditions for almost all housing finance in the U.S. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, through direct funding to public housing authorities and continuum of care organizations, supports millions of low-income households in every part of the country. Medicaid, the Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, and other federal agencies provide additional support to individuals, landlords, and mortgage lenders.

The current Administration and Congress may carry out the most sweeping restructuring of federal housing policy in decades. Proposals include the transition of rental housing assistance from direct appropriations to block grants, establishment of work requirements, expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, continuation of the opportunity zones program, and more. The end result of these actions would be to devolve to states and localities, and private and civic stakeholders, greater responsibility for expanding the supply of housing, boosting homeownership and helping low- and moderate-income households afford and access quality rental housing. This would amount to the greatest change in the U.S. housing ecosystem since the 1930s.

Many of the recent state and local innovations in housing represent a de-facto defederalization of housing activity in the U.S. as housing demands have grown and federal policy has been in near stasis for decades. States, localities, and the civic sector are looking to their own balance sheets, their own constitutional powers, their own enabling legislation, to identify what they can do to develop housing, preserve housing, protect tenants, encourage homeownership, minimize displacement, and ensure that their residents can achieve the American dream.

These state and local innovations have gained new urgency and importance. Many of them are programs, policies, or processes that places across the country can implement now without any federal support, and could measurably increase housing production, preserve their existing housing stock, reduce homelessness, and lead to a more prosperous community. There may be no pure substitute for the size and scale of the federal government’s role in housing in this country, but state and local leaders can make a real difference.

These innovations have already led to the creation of multiple toolkits that feature examples of best housing practices and, in some cases, “how-to” guides on designing and implementing these practices at the state or local levels. They include toolkits and playbooks from the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties, National Multifamily Housing Council, Local Housing Solutions at the Furman Center at NYU, and from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others.

The National Housing Crisis Task Force’s State and Local Housing Action Plan draws from recent and promising innovations that have the greatest potential to transform state and local housing ecosystems towards greater production and preservation at lower cost and greater speed. The premise of the Action Plan is threefold:

• First, the Action Plan highlights complementary activities across the five segments of the housing ecosystem: land, capital, construction, regulation and policy, and governance. Any given tool, when paired with other tools from the Action Plan, should be complementary such that, taken together, the tools are greater than the sum of their parts. The theory of impact of the state and local action plan is that, within a given community, at least one tool from each of the five segments can be implemented, either by the local government, the state government, or the local civic sector. Implementing five tools simultaneously should have a catalytic impact in a region.
• Second, the Action Plan connects the roles of different actors in the housing ecosystem: state governments and housing finance agencies, local governments and public housing authorities, philanthropies, private sources of capital, and private companies. The Task Force’s Action Plan serves as a node between traditionally siloed components of the housing ecosystem to more efficiently diffuse innovations across the country.
• Third, the Action Plan largely draws on the innovations from members of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, who are co-authors of the tools in the action plan and describe in detail how the programs, policies, or processes were created and can be replicated. Additional learnings are drawn from the experience of Accelerator for America’s network
  of local leaders.

The State and Local 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.

To most effectively use the State and Local Housing Action Plan, communities should:

1. Assess the tools that they already have at their disposal. Cities can use existing tools like the Housing Strategy Review from Local Housing Solutions, or the Housing Supply Accelerator Field Guide from the National League of Cities. Local Housing Solutions also provides a Housing Needs Assessment tool with data from PolicyMap that can serve as a valuable resource.
2. Convene the players in their housing ecosystem: the state government, county government, city government, philanthropic community, major employers, developers and homebuilders, financial institutions, tenant advocates, and homeless service providers. States, counties, and cities should create a “Housing Strike Force” (outlined as a tool in the Governance section).
3. Identify the tools from the State and Local Housing Action Plan that can make an impact in their communities and identify the existing entities that are able to implement them. Identify what is already possible in the existing state and local legal framework, and what may require policy change to enact. Outline Commitments to Action where each player
   commits to implementing their part of a localized plan.
4. Pass policies, create programs, and improve processes from the State and Local Housing Action Plan that can reduce the cost and speed of construction, preserve existing housing, and allow people of all backgrounds to afford to live in the places they wish to call home.

Not every part of the State and Local Housing Action Plan will make sense in each jurisdiction. Some tools are appropriate for high-growth, high-cost markets where land is scarce and expensive. Other tools are more appropriate for legacy communities where land is abundant, vacant structures a blight, and rehabilitation the most pressing need. Given the federated nature of housing solutions, details matter. Differences in state law make certain things a non-starter in some communities that will be obvious in others. The tools within the State and Local Housing Action Plan spell out the type of communities where the tool is most appropriate and actionable.

The State and Local Housing Action Plan is not meant to be exhaustive — many of the existing toolkits and playbooks offer a breadth of tools that many communities have developed over decades. Instead, the Action Plan is meant to highlight new innovations from across the country that have the potential to be catalytic when implemented.

The State and Local Housing Action Plan is meant to be a living document. As places develop new tools to respond to changes from the federal government, the Task Force will identify what those are and how they can diffuse and scale to other communities across the country. These new innovations will need to be developed in a more difficult environment, with even less access to federal funds, greater market uncertainty, and with related investments in community and economic development under threat.

Next Steps

The innovations identified in the State and Local Housing Action Plan already exist and can be diffused and scaled across the country. It’s time to bring these innovations to more places. The Task Force will work to put these tools into action in communities across the U.S. through its Mayors’ Implementation Committee (MIC), co-chaired by Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix and Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City. The MIC will serve as an implementation arm of the  Task Force by testing innovations in their cities and states and providing a platform for national learning and replication. Mayors, county executives, and state leaders will need enhanced capacity and access to subject matter expertise in order to implement the tools highlighted in this Action Plan. Accelerator for America will provide technical assistance to elected officials and their staff to adapt each of these tools to their local context and successfully overcome political, financial, and legislative hurdles.