On December 7, the Smart Growth Network gathered at the offices of the National Association of REALTORS® to discuss one of the most pressing issues today: the shortage of housing across the country. At December’s quarterly meeting, the Network brought together experts to discuss how communities can expand the availability of high-quality, resilient, and affordable housing and retrofit the existing housing supply for resilience in the face of natural disasters.
There is a national housing shortage of millions of homes, and much of the existing housing stock is deteriorating with age. At the same time, many homes are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate risks, such as costly damage from intense storms, wind damage, flooding, and extreme heat and cold without sufficient insulation. The expense of retrofitting affordable homes to keep people safe from these risks is a nationwide challenge, especially when these necessary improvements might mean the house is no longer affordable.
The recent Smart Growth Network meeting, hosted by the National Association of REALTORS®, brought together experts to discuss how communities can expand the availability of high-quality, resilient, and affordable housing and retrofit the existing housing supply for resilience in the face of natural disasters.
This winter’s quarterly meeting explored the intersecting challenges of building and maintaining housing that is both affordable and resilient to natural hazards, as well as the creative ways practitioners work to solve these challenges. Panelists from the advocacy world, nonprofit developers, and the federal government described how each of their teams advances this work, the unique challenges they face, and what needs to change to better address the compounding housing crisis. The meeting was welcomed by Ted Toon, Senior Advisor for Building Decarbonization and Finance at EPA, and Calvin Gladney, President and CEO of Smart Growth America, who set the context for this important conversation.
“If you’re taking a Smart Growth approach, it’s a “yes, and.” We want more housing in the right places: where there are jobs, where there are amenities, where there’s existing infrastructure.” – Calvin Gladney
The recently published Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook, shared by Lauren Lowery, the Director of Housing and Community Development at National League of Cities (NLC), was a centerpiece of the conversation. This resource is for local elected officials and planners to expand, preserve, and improve the quantity and quality of homes in their communities. To build the playbook, NLC hosted a series of convenings that brought public and private stakeholders to the table to discuss construction and development, finance, land use and regulations, and infrastructure and the workforce as they relate to developing more housing. The resulting playbook is a tool that many communities can use to create the environment of collaboration essential to addressing the housing crisis.
Key Insights from the Playbook:
- A systems approach is necessary to solve these challenges
- There is no one solution, but multilayered solutions can work
- Aim for an actionable level of consensus instead of perfect consensus
A panel discussion followed, moderated by Lowery, which consisted of Danilo Pelletiere, the Multifamily Investments Director in the Office of Recapitalization at HUD, Maia Shanklin Roberts, the Vice President of Real Estate Development at Preservation of Affordable Housing, Inc., and Sahar Soltani, the Director of Housing Finance at Mutual Housing California. Shanklin uplifted that not everyone is starting with the understanding that housing is a human right. Pelletiere described how depreciation is the main way we create affordable housing in the US and underscored that the corresponding decline in quality is a growing issue, especially when people can’t afford to rehabilitate their homes. Shanklin and Soltani described the importance of federal programs in building, maintaining, and retrofitting affordable housing and the outsized demand for these funds. Pelletiere identified the complexity of affordable housing funding as a great inefficiency in the process of developing new affordable homes.
The panel also discussed resident preferences and described how sustainability measures and other design choices impact residents’ day-to-day lives and budgets, such as lower utility bills from energy efficiency. “Housing production and sustainability are complementary goals…Sustainability should not be an obstacle to housing production,” said Soltani.
To expand resilient, affordable housing, the panel recommended making sure any policy proposal has funding attached so that when green design standards are required for affordable housing, lawmakers ensure there is money to do so. The entire housing industry is still catching up from the 2008 recession, so there is a lot of work to be done, especially to make housing resilient.
After the panel, attendees participated in small group discussions that focused on strategies to sustain the housing supply and the nexus of environmental health, resilience, and housing. Conversations were wide-ranging, from insurance mechanisms to federal programs, and included sharing several related resources:
- Developing Urban Resilience website and toolkit, which includes a matrix of 140 strategies to apply across climate hazards, from Urban Land Institute (ULI)
- “How to Choose, Use and Better Understand Climate Risk Analytics” is a research report that underscores how complex it can be to work with climate data from ULI
- “Building the Future” is a report on state and local policy innovations for housing supply from the ULI Terwilliger Center
- The Multifamily Portfolio Carbon Emissions Roadmap Tool and Calculator from Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future
- The Eliminating Zoning Barriers to Affordable Housing Guidebook from Smart Growth America and NALCAB provides practical and evidence-based solutions for practitioners seeking to address the housing supply and affordability crisis through zoning reform