Housing Affordability Can Be Solved in This Generation
America has 22.4 million rent-burdened households and a housing production rate still well below the levels needed to close the gap. This toolkit, developed with Professor Matthew Kwatinetz of the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate, makes the case that rental housing affordability is not an intractable problem but a solvable one. Drawing on original data analysis and a comprehensive scan of housing policy research, the report charts a three-part path to affordability through local deregulation, preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing and targeted public subsidy. It also introduces a new metric, Time to Address (TTA), to measure how quickly different policies can move the needle.
What's Included in the Toolkit
- A sizing of today's affordability shortfall: 22.4 million rent-burdened households and the demand-side math behind it
- Time to Address (TTA), a new metric that measures how quickly a given policy can move the needle at scale
- Policy case studies on deregulation, tax incentives and NOAH preservation, each graded on speed, scale, cost and targeting
- A coordinated three-part policy pipeline sized to close the gap within a generation
- Housing 101 reference materials covering development finance, feasibility economics and a full Affordable Housing Glossary
How to Use the Toolkit
The toolkit is designed to work both as a complete argument and as a modular reference.
Download the full report for the end-to-end case: why rental housing affordability is solvable within a generation, why no single policy gets there alone and what a realistic, coordinated pipeline looks like.
Or, dive into specific sections using the chapter menu below.
Chapter Descriptions
About one-third of American households rent their homes. Today, more than half of renter households, over 22.4 million, are rent-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. This section frames the scope of the affordability crisis and lays out the report's three-part solution: expanding subsidized housing (Capital A Affordable), preserving naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) and activating dormant development through local deregulation and by-right tax incentives. Together, these strategies form a balanced pipeline capable of creating or preserving roughly 22.5 million affordable homes within a generation.
This section establishes the analytical foundation of the toolkit. It documents the decline in housing production since the 1970s, quantifies the gap between supply and demand, and introduces Time to Address (TTA), a new metric that measures how long it would take current production rates to close each state's and metro's rent burden deficit. TTA analysis across all 50 states and the 50 largest MSAs shows that most jurisdictions are generations, or more than a century, away from solving affordability under present conditions. It also identifies where naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) remains feasible without subsidy and examines how local policy, cost drivers and market structure shape outcomes at the metro level.
Three in-depth case studies examine the real-world performance of the toolkit's core supply-side strategies. The Deregulation case study analyzes how zoning reform, permitting streamlining and regulatory cost reduction can unlock dormant development capacity, with lessons from Oregon on how contradictory policies can neutralize well-designed reforms. The Tax Incentives case study evaluates by-right property tax tools, drawing on New York City's 421-a and 485-x programs and Texas's public finance corporation model, to show how fiscal incentives convert idle sites and sidelined capital into units at market scale. The Revive & Retain case study examines NOAH preservation through public-private partnerships, finding that fund-based strategies, private capital vehicles and GSE financing can together protect existing affordable stock at per-unit costs 30 to 70 percent below new construction.
The conclusion synthesizes the toolkit's findings into a three-phase implementation roadmap spanning launch (months zero to 12), scale (years one through three) and sustained recalibration (years three through 10 and beyond). It grades the primary policy tools across 10 weighted criteria, including scale, speed, fiscal impact, targeting and preservation, and closes with a call to rebalance the national policy toolkit toward faster, scalable strategies while sustaining targeted subsidies for subsidy-dependent households. The central argument: affordability within a generation is not rhetoric. It is a timeline that requires discipline, transparency and coordinated action across local, state and federal levels.
This section provides the financial and definitional literacy needed to evaluate policy tools on their merits. It covers the categories of rental housing, from market-rate and NOAH to Capital A Affordable and by-right programs; the mechanics of capital budgets (sources and uses); how operating budgets and net operating income (NOI) determine project feasibility; and how cost impacts ripple from regulatory burdens to rent levels. Affordable Housing 101 extends the analysis to income limits, rent standards and the role of subsidy in restructuring capital budgets. Together these sections establish the economic framework against which all policy interventions in the toolkit are measured.
The Appendix contains the full data underlying the toolkit's TTA and NOAH analyses. Chart 1 tracks annual housing completions by purpose. Chart 2 presents state-level TTA results across all 50 states. Chart 3 maps TTA and NOAH feasibility across the 50 largest MSAs, identifying which metros can still produce unsubsidized affordable housing under current rent and income conditions. An Affordable Housing Glossary rounds out the section with definitions of key terms used throughout the report.
