(co-authored with Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, Ben Preis, Michael Saadine and AJ Herrmann)

Earlier this week, the National Housing Crisis Task Force released the first tranche of tools in its State and Local Housing Action Plan for communities. The introduction to the State and Local Housing Action Plan summarizes all of the expected tools we plan to release in the coming months.

Our premise is straightforward: states and localities have more power than they know, more capital than they think, and more capacity than they have utilized to address the nation’s affordable housing crisis. 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 United States 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 Administration, and other federal agencies provide additional support to individuals, landlords, and mortgage lenders.

The Trump Administration and Congress appear likely to carry out the most sweeping restructuring of federal policy in decades. Actions taken by the Administration have already eliminated fair housing protections and scaled back the HUD workforce. Further actions, if successful, could increase the cost of construction, reduce federal support for public housing, vouchers and other appropriated programs and tax incentives and alter the current system of primary mortgage insurance and secondary market credit enhancements.

The 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 United States 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 and 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. Let’s be clear: 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 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 innovations across the five segments of the housing ecosystem: land, capital, construction, regulation, 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 or more 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. By engaging with national constituency groups such as the National Governors Association, National League of Cities, National Association of Counties, Urban Land Institute, National Multifamily Housing Council, and others, 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 coauthors of many 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.

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.

However, many of these innovations are built on the foundation of the federal system. Many local capital tools are meant to integrate with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Project-Based or Section 8 Vouchers, New Market Tax Credits in mixed-use developments, and other sources of federal funds. Many private-sector deals rely on mortgage insurance by the Federal Housing Administration, on secondary markets guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Feddie Mac, and on prime mortgage rates set by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Actions taken by local governments, public housing authorities, and public transit agencies often require signoffs from the federal government, including staff approvals from HUD and DOT.

Thus, in the shifting and uncertain times of early 2025, 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.

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 and investors, tenant advocates, and homeless service providers. States, counties, and cities should create a “Housing Strike Team” (outlined as a tool in the Governance section), and should also collaboratively agree to a “State and Local Compact” (a tool being developed for future release 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. 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.

Earlier this week, the National Housing Crisis Task Force released an initial batch of six tools:

• Responding to a Crisis: Lessons from Atlanta’s Housing Strike Force

• Land Use, Permitting, and Building Code Reform: A Path Forward

• Housing Ballot Measures

• Expanding Housing Supply: A Call for Municipal Property Advisors

• “Right-Sizing” Property Tax Incentives to Increase Housing Affordability

• Pre-Purchasing to Increase Modular Construction Capacity

These tools are drafts, meant for public comment and engagement as the Task Force develops the rest of its State and Local Housing Action Plan over the coming months. They also represent an initial batch of tools that communities can implement right now to support their residents in a time of great uncertainty.

We cannot lose sight of the housing crisis, and we must continue to implement solutions now that set the foundations for long-term change towards a better housing system in the United States. You can find the introduction to the state and local action plan here, with a full description of all of the tools. As we continue to finalize the Action Plan, we will update and add to these tools. We hope you will take the time to review them and identify how your community can begin working toward implementing some or all of these innovative practices. If you have questions or feedback, please contact us.

Bruce Katz is the Founding Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. Mary Ellen Wiederwohl is the President and CEO of Accelerator for America. Benjamin Preis is the Director of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Nowak Lab. Michael Saadine is a Senior Advisor to the Nowak Lab and Managing Partner at Invisible Group, an interdisciplinary real estate investment platform. A.J. Herrmann is the Director of Policy and Program Innovation at Accelerator for America.