Your best ideas on increasing housing supply wanted

A policy competition from the Federation of American Scientists

One of the most frequent questions I get in life is what ideas do I have for federal action to address regulatory barriers to housing supply, and to be entirely honest I have to admit that one reason the question keeps coming up is that I’ve never hit upon many incredibly compelling ideas. This is an area where the basic contours of the policy problem are increasingly recognized, and where we are seeing more and more examples of useful models for state action, but where the federal conversation still isn’t that robust even though there’s a good amount of interest.

So some good news: The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and partners are crowdsourcing ideas for national policies that could increase the supply of housing in the United States. A selection of the best ideas will be invited to pitch policy leaders and be discussed on Slow Boring. If you’re interested, head over to their challenge page and submit a brief idea by August 12th. 

Obviously anyone who’s ever read anything that I have to say on this topic is familiar with the broad issue of exclusionary zoning and the arguments for regulatory reforms that promote density. These are overwhelmingly implemented by local governments, though we now have a growing tradition of state action in the land use space.

But we also have a growing set of stakeholders at all levels of the federal government who are sincerely interested in the topic and in the market for good, feasible ideas for how to make a difference. A lot of people are cynical about the political process, with some reason, but that makes it easy to underestimate the very large number of earnest and well-motivated people working in government who genuinely value good, implementable ideas and FAS has had success in the past with similar crowdsourcing efforts moving policy. There are all kinds of barriers to change, but in this space lack of clear ideas for federal action is itself a big one and we think the odds are good that there are people out there who can help.

It seems very unlikely that the federal government would get directly involved in writing zoning codes or other land use regulations. But the federal government does spend large sums of money, much of which takes the form of grants that go to state and local governments.

The way of looking at an issue that comes most naturally to members of congress is to hear that we are talking about housing, and then think of which agency does housing and come up with the fact that there’s a Department of Housing and Urban Development. So if you want to do something on housing, you should maybe look at a HUD grant program. And it’s certainly possible that you could accomplish useful things by using HUD programs as a lever. But there are real limits to this strategy. The kinds of localities where the economic and social benefits of more housing are largest — affluent suburbs in expensive metropolitan areas — tend not to get much HUD money, which is generally targeted at poor cities. And HUD programs are generally pretty small in size such that they may not be a very potent lever.

At the same time, zoning connects naturally to all kinds of other policy areas — transportation infrastructure, water, education — so it’s conceivable that there are more creative ideas that would also make sense.

Beyond that, even though zoning is near and dear to my heart there’s more to housing than land use. The federal government is deeply involved in housing finance along multiple dimensions. The federal government does a tremendous amount of implicit housing policy through the tax code. It’s also the primary regulatory of manufactured housing as a product even while taking a hands-off attitude toward regulations governing its placement. And homes, of course, are complicated physical objects that require a lot of labor and materials to construct with various aspects of public policy actually or potentially touching nearly every aspect of that construction process.

The federal government, in short, has many possible points of entry into the national housing policy conversation. But even though the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all in their various ways identified increasing the national housing supply as a desirable policy objective actual policy change has been modest at best. This is your chance to help make a difference in that and I’m personally very proud to help play a small role in promoting this.

So, again, if you’re feeling inspired please head over to their challenge page and submit a brief idea by August 12th. You can find details there about the structure but their specific areas of interest include:

• Developing federal incentive structures that promote the construction of higher-density housing or multi-family housing in high-demand metropolitan regions.

• Deploying or expanding new financing mechanisms to build more housing or fill critical gaps in home financing support for families.

• Promoting housing innovation, including in building materials and methods, to reduce the financial and environmental costs of building new housing.

• Aligning current policies around transportation, water, sewer, and other infrastructure and investments with housing production.

Let’s make some good stuff happen!