Introduction & Summary of Tools

The State and Local Housing Action Plan from the National Housing Crisis Task Force represents the culmination of nearly 12 months of work. The tools in the Action Plan were selected in consultation with the Task Force’s 28 members and involved interviewing more than 50 practitioners and policymakers throughout the nation. These interviews included individuals involved in multifamily and single-family development, tenant advocacy, private equity investment, financial institutions and lenders, providers of homeless services, public housing authorities, housing finance agencies, community land trusts, academic researchers, housing accelerators, trade associations representing every part of the housing ecosystem, elected officials at the state, county, and local levels, and more.

Based on these interviews and their own expertise, Task Force members identified the most promising new innovations of the past decade that are proving successful in producing and preserving housing. Some of these innovations — like Atlanta’s Strike Force, Montgomery County’s Housing Production Fund, or Houston’s Housing Command Centers for homelessness — are easily translatable and implementable nationwide in communities with varying levels of capacity. Others — like Atlanta’s and Chattanooga’s Public Asset Corporations or San Francisco’s Housing Accelerator Fund — require greater capacity and larger financial commitments, but are poised to deliver the greatest impact.

Policymakers at the state, county, and local level, along with civic partners like community foundations, nonprofits, and others, should consider the tools presented in this State and Local Housing Action Plan as a set of options that can solve a particular challenge within their housing ecosystem. To that end, each tool in the chapters that follow provide a summary, along with the answer to three questions: what challenge does this tool solve? What sorts of communities can use this tool? And what are the expected impacts of this tool?

The pages that follow summarize each of the five segments of the housing sector that the tools reach — land, capital, construction, regulation and policy, and governance — and describe each tool in brief.

Land interventions seek to ensure that publicly owned land is put in the service of housing production and preservation, and privately owned land, including land  owned by nonprofits and faith-based institutions, is encouraged towards its highest and best use. Currently, the public sector owns extensive but underutilized land and property assets that hold immense potential for addressing pressing housing challenges.

• Public Asset Corporations: Cities like Atlanta and Chattanooga are creating special purpose public asset corporations to redevelop public land into mixed-income housing. The Atlanta Urban Development Corporation and Invest Chattanooga are two new entities, both established as subsidiaries of their public housing authorities, that use a suite of public tools, including the use of public lands, revolving loan funds, tax abatements, and low-cost permanent financing to develop mixed-income housing. The Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority is an existing public authority that makes use of many of these same tools to develop housing.
• Municipal Property Advisors: Cities like Austin are using local procurement practices to contract with external third-party “Municipal Property Advisors” (“MPAs”) to serve as intermediaries on the jurisdiction’s behalf. These MPAs are responsible for identifying, monetizing, and redeveloping underutilized public assets to drive public objectives, including the production of affordable housing, through private investments. The Putting Assets to Work (PAW) Initiative has been working with several U.S. cities to invent solutions that are ripe for replication, like Municipal Property Advisors.

Capital interventions seek innovative capital stacks that enable more affordable housing. As federal funding sources shift, there will be an even greater need for cities to partner with local investors, banks, and philanthropy to create new capital stack components that can provide the necessary subsidy, close the gap, and produce housing, at scale, regardless of the macroeconomic cycle.

• Right-Sizing Property Tax Abatements: Places like Seattle and Texas are using tax abatements to ensure the creation or preservation of affordable housing. While some models are dialed in to ensure the appropriate trade-off between public and private costs and benefits, too many are poorly targeted, resulting in low uptake or public sector giveaways. The Task Force is developing an open-source “local tool for affordability” so localities can better calculate the value of their public investments.
• Place-Based Philanthropy as a Regional Catalyst: The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta has a multi-faceted strategy to address Atlanta’s urgent need for housing that includes the GoATL Affordable Housing Fund, a for-profit subsidiary of the foundation that invests private capital in affordable housing developments, and the TogetherATL Affordable Housing Fund that makes grants to nonprofit housing projects and supports the WORTH initiative to expand access to homeownership in communities of color. The Chicago Community Trust convened a large group of partners to launch the 3C Initiative, which supports homeownership opportunities for residents of disadvantaged communities through counseling, down payment assistance, and lowerinterest mortgages, with a focus on households making 60% of AMI. The San Diego Foundation has partnered with developers to launch the San Diego Housing Fund with the goal of producing 10,000 new units of affordable housing by 2034. These leaders are reimagining the role of community foundations and place-based philanthropy in funding the production and preservation of housing in their regions.
• State and Local Housing Ballot Measures: In 2024, local and state voters considered 53 measures to raise or preserve local revenue for affordable housing, less than half of the estimated 120 transportation and infrastructure related measures that state and local voters considered last year. This suggests that there are opportunities to greatly expand the use of housing ballot measures as a tool to promote local investment in housing production. These funds have the benefit of being locally controlled, are more responsive to local priorities and needs, and can be leveraged with private, philanthropic, and federal funding. Los Angeles County’s Measure A will provide approximately $1.1 billion annually to fund homes, shelter, and services to the homeless, as well as broader support for affordable housing production. Recent failed measures in places like Denver and the Bay Area also provide lessons that other communities can learn from as they consider how to design, organize, and campaign for their own local funding sources.
• Unlocking Public-Private Collaboration to Speed Housing Delivery: San Francisco’s Housing Accelerator Fund has developed a set of tools and practices allowing them to deliver affordable units without up-front public subsidy; the public sector engages by pledging future operating support. This effectively turns real estate risk into public finance risk and regularizes the process of designing and building affordable housing. Other communities, such as Austin and Philadelphia, are iterating with the Housing Accelerator Fund model to solve challenges unique to those geographies, while Cleveland’s Housing
  Investment Fund is partnering with an existing intermediary to similarly provide flexible financing.
• Public Investments in Homeownership: The Utah Homes Investment Program starter home program demonstrates the impact of pairing interventions on the demand side like homebuyer assistance with interventions on the supply side like an infrastructure bank and funding for construction. In Utah, the state repurposed $300 million to provide belowmarket rate loans to developers who produce for-sale homes and condominiums under $450,000. Washington County, WI developed their Next Generation Housing Initiative to provide 0% interest loans of up to $20,000 per unit for predevelopment work, along with permit fee reimbursements, in exchange for homes sold below $420,000.
• Mixed-Income Public Development: Originating with Montgomery County but having now spread to Chicago, Atlanta, and Michigan, housing production funds are revolving loan funds meant to replace equity during the construction phase of multifamily deals. These revolving loan funds provide substantial capital for the development of new housing, granting the public entities that provide the loan joint ownership in the project and delivering affordable units in what may have been a market rate deal.

Construction interventions seek to reduce the cost of building and renovating housing. As the housing crisis has worsened, the housing sector is (finally) being disrupted by technological innovations and advances in building techniques and modular construction. The housing industry is witnessing new ways to aggregate market demand, new forms of designing, financing and delivering off-site manufacturing solutions and new solutions to address associated supplier,
workforce, and logistics issues.

• Public Pre-Purchasing of Modular: Cities like Cleveland are actively recruiting modular factories with the promise of using a combination of government grants and publicly owned land. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council — a regional urban planning agency in the Boston area — has launched a partnership with Newton, Cambridge, Everett, and Boston to bring a modular housing manufacturing facility to their region. The Minneapolis Public Housing Authority successfully sited 84 units with 16 modular apartments as part of a public housing redevelopment.
• Building for Insurability, Resilience, and Energy Efficiency: As the size and frequency of natural disasters increase, many insurance providers are exiting marketplaces or increasing premiums to levels that are unaffordable to many homeowners. Additionally, utility costs in many parts of the country are increasing substantially, representing a significant burden on residents. However, a suite of financial programs, building techniques, and incentives seek to increase homes’ resilience and energy efficiency, leading to decreased ownership costs, decreased insurance premiums, and greater longterm sustainability of new housing, both single-family and apartments. This includes the use of the FORTIFIED standard for new homes, Passive House Institute of the U.S. (PHIUS) standard, and programs from state utilities like the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development’s (DHCD) Multifamily Energy Efficiency and Housing Affordability (MEEHA) program.

Regulation and Policy interventions reduce obstacles in the way of housing production through efforts such as land use, permitting, and building code reform as well as protect renters through practices like rental registries. Cities and counties are recognizing that too many local regulations  drive up the cost and slow down the construction of housing while also acknowledging that their regulatory powers can ensure a fairer housing market.

• Land use, Permitting, and Building Code Reform: States as different as Oregon, Montana, California, Connecticut, Utah, Washington, Arizona, Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maine, Florida, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Minnesota have all enacted statewide zoning reform in recent years. Cities and counties across the country from Portland, OR and Boise, ID to Minneapolis, MN and Austin, TX, to Arlington, VA and Cambridge, MA have all done substantial rewrites of their zoning codes to allow for more homes of all shapes and sizes. Cities, counties, and states are also tacklingbuilding code reform to allow for more types of housing on more parcel types — such as small multifamily buildings with only a single stair. And states and local authorities having jurisdiction are all experimenting with ways to make the permit processes faster, including expedited review for affordable housing, concierge project management, and broader regulatory reform.
• Regulatory Reform for Industrialized Housing Delivery: Industrialized Housing Delivery is an integrated system of housing production that uses best practices from other industries to provide faster, lower-cost, and more reliable homes. Primarily enabled through offsite construction, i.e., panelized and modular homes, industrialized housing delivery can be accelerated through building code reform, aggregated demand from the public sector, and housing certification programs from the public sector. This tool describes international comparisons and provides a set of recommendations for state policymakers to harmonize building codes, integrate state housing offices towards greater efficiency, and enable aggregated demand towards industrialized housing delivery.

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. Innovations include new mayor-led organizing efforts as well as the creation of nonprofit intermediaries.

• Housing Command Centers: Cities and counties across the U.S. are organizing their governments and nonprofit communities differently around homelessness solutions. These “Housing Command Centers” in Cleveland, OH, Houston, TX and other localities utilize a disaster-response approach to homelessness, enabling them to act with urgency and bring together systems advocates, coordinated outreach teams, and government departments to expediently re-house people who are unsheltered. The Command Centers conduct weekly case conferencing meetings to coordinate the process and work
  with private landlords to provide people with housing and the critical support services needed to end their homelessness and ensure they remain stably housed.
• Strike Forces for Housing Delivery: Under the leadership of Mayor Andre Dickens, the City of Atlanta has launched a Housing Strike Force. It includes the senior executives of every major public agency that touches housing or has public land that could be developed for housing. It aims to catalyze the production of 20,000 affordable housing units and has launched more than a dozen initiatives, including selecting 40 public land sites for housing development, raised $370M+ in public, private and civic commitments, created an expedited permitting system for affordable projects, and built a one-top-shop for residents called the Housing Help Center.
• Organizing Capital for Housing and Community Development: Founded in 2018, Opportunity Alabama (OPAL) is a private economic development organization focused ontransforming Alabama’s communities through public and private investment in physical spaces and places. OPAL helps communities leverage federal Opportunity Zone tax incentives for projects and initiatives that improve quality of place and re-energize local economies. OPAL works with a broad network of developers, property owners, economic development professionals, local community leaders, and investors to support projects that move communities forward with new workforce housing, market rate housing, mixeduse development, historic revitalization, industrial development, and more.

The current moment also calls for new innovations. Over the next year, the Task Force will be developing a National Housing Vision, meant to provide a roadmap for the radical remaking of the housing ecosystem in America, with simpler capital stacks, greater efficiency, decreased cost of construction, widespread adoption of industrialized construction techniques, and the transformation of the fractured housing ecosystem into a cohesive industry.