Amid uncertainty over how President Trump and the new Congress plan to address housing, city leaders say they've made progress building more homes and want to remind federal policymakers they still need their help.
Elected and appointed officials at the local level said they've been innovative in recent years in expanding housing production and helping owners rehabilitate existing residences. In some areas, local leaders have been able to build by finding a consensus among residents to support more homes and making them affordable.
But adding more homes in the coming years might not be enough, said officials at a meeting in the past week of the National League of Cities in Washington, D.C.
“I’m cautiously optimistic we’re going to make progress. We know most of the housing in this country is preserved and produced by private industry and this is going to be an administration that pops in revenue" for these companies, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. “But let’s face it, we live in a new Gilded Age. If we’re going to solve the housing crisis, the average wage needs to be able to afford the average home being built.”
With the Los Angeles fires and other recent natural disasters fresh on everyone’s minds, attendees pointed to insurance as an issue they want the federal government to do something about. The sole member of Congress to speak at the meeting, former Houston mayor and now Texas Representative Sylvester Turner, said he hopes to see insurance reform that will bring down rates for homeowners. Beyond higher premiums, some insurers have withdrawn from certain areas they say are at risk from natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires.
U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, and Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, are working on an insurance bill.
“We've all seen what's happening in California, but it's not just California,” Kennedy said during Scott Turner’s nomination hearing Thursday to be secretary of housing and urban development. “It's Appalachia, it's Florida, it's Louisiana. And we're going to have to address this. I'm not talking about government subsidies, I'm talking about setting up some sort of national program that invites as many people as possible to join so you can spread the risk.”
Adding their voices to the chorus of concerns about housing challenges, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Institute of Architects reported results this month from a survey that showed city leaders expect the housing affordability crisis to worsen in the next few years. Mayors who answered the survey strongly favored maintaining existing federal housing programs and increasing their funding.
Local innovations
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser spoke at the National League of Cities event about meeting her goal to build 36,000 new homes, a third of them affordable, by 2025. Key to this success was the city’s efforts to enlist the backing of existing neighborhood residents, especially in wealthier areas like the Northwest that historically resisted affordable homes. In recent years, some parts of the city had thousands of affordably priced homes, while others had just a few hundred.
“I think that conversation has changed because of our transparency about the inequity of the distribution of housing,” said D.C. Deputy Mayor Nina Albert.
The city was creative in finding money for affordable homes, using tools including its inclusionary zoning program that requires developers building market-rate housing to set aside a percentage as affordable; tax abatements in high-income areas; and building on land owned by the city or federal governments, Albert said.
San Antonio sought residents’ backing for big-budget measures, like a 2022 bond that included $150 million for affordable housing. A third of that money is dedicated to homeownership, largely for fixing up existing houses; the city plans to build or preserve 28,000 residences. Voters supported funding housing, “not because we had fancy marketing but because the public created those plans,” Nirenberg said during a panel discussion about the state of housing and its impact on cities.
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Along with large housing bond measures and setting lofty goals for new home production, cities have also changed their zoning rules to allow smaller lots. Clearfield, Utah, a city of 34,000 residents a half-hour drive from Salt Lake City, recently did just that. Clearfield built 4,000 homes in the past five years, said Mayor Mark Shepherd, a member of the National League of Cities board of directors. Previously house lots in Clearfield had to be as much as half an acre, but now people are building on properties of closer to a tenth of an acre.
That helps, given that land has appreciated faster than homes in many parts of the country, according to Janneke Ratcliffe, vice president for housing policy at the Urban Institute.
From the Homes.com blog: The economics of real estate: 13 factors that affect home values
Concerns over restrictions
Sometimes the challenge in building affordable housing is at the state level, as in Arizona, where Tempe Mayor Corey Woods spoke about the state’s ban on inclusionary housing like the program in use in Washington, D.C. In Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix, leaders got creative and used a portion of the fees developers pay for permits to build affordable homes. The city also solicited voluntary contributions from developers. Through September, Tempe had leveraged $9.4 million of its own funds with more than $22 million in donations or pledges.
“Over the last 18 months in Tempe, we’ve seen rents go down about 3%, because we’re putting more supply in the marketplace,” Woods said.
The new presidential administration can help local leaders by not attaching too many strings to grants it gives to local governments, Shepherd said, “so mayors and other elected officials who know what’s going on in their cities have the ability to use that money in a way that benefits our residents.”
Shepherd also expressed misgivings about certain aspects of the Trump administration’s policies, including a promise of the mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants. Shepherd said that approach may be helpful for housing supply by opening up some homes for people who are authorized to be here but will hurt efforts to build since so many construction workers are immigrants.
“We have carried our message through various presidencies — housing should not be a partisan issue, it’s about people,” Shepherd said. “We have to keep that in mind.”
