How NMHC's research is showing up in national coverage, on conference stages and even in global policy conversations.
Since its release in June, NMHC's Housing Affordability Toolkit has become a reference point for journalists, researchers and policymakers looking for a clearer way to size the nation's rental housing affordability challenges and weigh the tools available to address them.
Developed in partnership with the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate, the Toolkit charts a three-part path to affordability through local deregulation, preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing and targeted public subsidy. It also 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.
The TTA framework was the focus of a Sept. 10 installment of The New York Times' Calculator column, "A Century to Build Enough Affordable Rentals," by Elizabeth A. Harris. Drawing on the Toolkit, Harris reported that in most of the country, relying on subsidized affordable housing under current policies would take more than 100 years to address the problem.
The column highlighted North Carolina as the only state positioned to close its rent burden gap within a generation, which the Toolkit defines as 35 years. It credited the state's relatively low construction costs and the way cities such as Charlotte and Raleigh layer local subsidies on top of federal programs.
Days later, the Toolkit reached another audience through Slow Boring, the policy newsletter founded by Matthew Yglesias. In a Sept. 14 piece by Halina Bennet examining San Francisco's rising housing costs amid the A.I. boom, Slow Boring linked to the report and cited its finding that most states would need more than a century to close their affordability gap under current policies. The piece also pointed to the Toolkit's recommendations for spurring development and preserving existing affordable housing.
NMHC staff are also taking the Toolkit's findings on the road. This week at the CREW Network Convention in Miami, NMHC's Dave Borsos joins two NMHC members for "What It Takes to Build: Multifamily Markets, Policy and Supply." The session examines the forces shaping multifamily investment and development and how policy decisions can either open the door to new supply or stand in its way. The discussion connects the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, an important first step at the federal level, to opportunities for state and local action, drawing on the Toolkit to show how deregulation, tax abatements and targeted subsidies can work together in different markets.
The Toolkit is reaching a global audience as well. On Sept. 24, Caitlin Sugrue Walter, NMHC's SVP and Head of Research and Innovation, joins NYU’s Professor Matthew Kwatinetz at the World Bank Group's Safe Space Dialogue on Housing in Washington, D.C., for a discussion on housing affordability, policy tools and global lessons. The conversation draws on the research behind the Toolkit to explore how data and analytical tools can help pinpoint where affordability pressures are most concentrated and how policy approaches translate across cities and countries.
The Toolkit's central argument is that rental housing affordability is a solvable problem, and that no single policy gets there alone. Metro-level TTA analysis and naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) market data are available for all 50 of the largest U.S. metropolitan statistical areas.
