Letter from the Editors: Spotlight on Local Affordable Housing Strategies

The community development finance field has focused on financing and maintaining affordable housing for people with low and moderate incomes. The fruits of this effort have been plentiful, including billions of dollars in investment and millions of affordable housing units. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program alone has produced more than 2.5 million homes. 

Yet, despite these investments, cities across the country are grappling with affordable housing crises.  The number of people who need access to affordable housing far outstrips the available supply, and people are spending a higher percentage of their income on rent. And unlike in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the community development finance field formalized, the need for affordable housing has expanded to those traditionally thought of as being in the middle class, including teachers and other civil servants. Coupled with reductions in federal support for affordable housing, the need for innovative and strategic approaches at the local level arguably has never been more urgent.  

In this month’s spotlight, we’ve gathered resources highlighting how community development practitioners and local governments are partnering to create this innovation and address the housing affordability crisis. We feature a story about efforts underway in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Denver to create more housing, and caught up with the Furman Center at New York University about their new “Local Housing Solutions,” which aims to assist practitioners in assessing their city’s current housing strategy, and in determining the best strategies and policies to pursue.  We’ve also included a guide from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition on housing ballot initiatives from across the country that could provide a key source of funding to fill the affordable housing gap at the local level in our “In Practice” resources. No one has a panacea right now, but our hope is that these resources help move your work and the conversation around housing affordability forward.