NeighborWorks® America convened a Housing Supply Solutions Lab last week to provide affordable housing and community development practitioners in the network a chance to dig deeply into innovative building techniques, zoning and land-use reform, and attainability and affordability. The lab format allowed the participants a chance not just to listen, but to speak, learn and solve challenges together. They left the eight-hour session with new connections and new ideas.
“The housing supply and preservation challenges we are facing are real, they are complex and they are not going to solve themselves,” NeighborWorks President & CEO Marietta Rodriguez said in her opening remarks.
There is no one product or innovation that fixes everything, she said, but there are solutions. Participants came together to lift up those solutions, to learn from one another and to figure out what it would take to scale solutions across the country.
“Through our Rural Initiative and partnerships like Clayton Homes, network organizations have been educating local leaders, challenging outdated perceptions and integrating factory-built housing into real development pipelines,” Rodriguez shared.
The event was sponsored by Capital One, with additional support from Clayton.
Can we crack the code?
Christopher Herbert, Managing Director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, delivered the keynote address for the Solutions Lab, making it in from Boston despite cancelled flights and several feet of snow.
“The number of cost-burdened renter households has reached a record high,” he said. The problem hasn’t gotten exponentially worse for the lowest income renters, because it’s hard to get worse when you’re already at the bottom. But the problem has become increasingly worse for people who earn $45,000 to $74,999 a year.
Suddenly, he said, it’s become an issue not just for people concerned about those making the lowest income, “it’s for people who are making decent livings.” And that has changed the conversation.
Meanwhile, on the homeowner side, cost burdens started increasing over the last couple of years, not just in construction costs but in the cost of property tax and insurance. The result is that homes are now the least affordable they’ve been going back decades and downpayment is increasingly out of reach.
“The price of a medium-priced home has risen to levels we have not seen before. So, the issue of sustainability, of climate and insurance markets is really important in the conversation about affordability for homeowners.”
Sometimes people joke that Herbert works for The Center of Gloom and Doom. “But you,” he told the crowd, “are the source of hope.”
That hope comes in the form of housing solutions and innovations. In having conversations about different types of homes that can be attainable – something that isn’t happening in the housing market today, the way it did in the 1990s, when the housing industry responded to affordability pressure with townhomes and condominiums.
“Do we have an income problem or a housing cost problem?” Herbert asked. “We have both. So, what do we do?”
We have to encourage and enable the production of smaller and simpler homes, he said. We have to think about producing those homes through different, efficient means, including factory-built housing. And we have to make more efficient use of the land by allowing higher density housing, he said, setting up the lab’s “deep dives,” which also included discussions of land trusts for permanent affordability, of energy efficiency and of preserving existing housing.
Finding solutions in the network
The NeighborWorks network of nearly 250 organizations across the country has made housing solutions a focus. Michael Butchko, vice president of Business Intelligence at NeighborWorks America, highlighted some of the network’s collective wins – and challenges.
Since 2010, the network has created 318,000 homeowners, he said. Meanwhile, the network has preserved client homes and has built new ones – developing over 24,000 for-sale homes and creating, preserving and acquiring over 203,000 rental units.
But the market issues have impacted the network, he said. Over the past 15 years, the median home price paid by network homebuyers has doubled to $261,000. Primary costs and payments have doubled as well.
Incomes have increased, too, Butchko said. “But it didn’t increase at nearly the same rate.”
Meanwhile, costs to the network have risen rapidly as well. From 2017 to 2025, the network saw an increase of 56% in rental construction costs in the Midwest and Northeast. In the Southern and Western regions, those costs were even higher.
“This speaks to the pressures on housing providers,” he said.
Before the conference, Butchko’s division surveyed the network with a focus on solutions. That survey showed how the network planned to tap into innovations.
- 57% of those surveyed have produced or have plans to produce modular housing
- 39% have produced or have plans for manufactured housing
- 55% have produced or have plans for other alternative construction, including accessory dwelling units, mass timber, and even 3-D printing,
“Despite rising costs and low inventory, our network continues to serve thousands of people annually, to meet people where they are, but also to understand the environment and the moment, and the need to bring innovative solutions to bear in order to deal with the supply crisis. It’s going to take organizations like ours and organizations like yours to chip away at solutions and build supply so that we can meet the moment.”
A training model that works
The goal of the solutions lab was to provide chances for the network to learn from one another and to get to ask questions directly from the people doing the work.
“The best way to solve our challenges is together,” said Cormac Molloy, director of Sustainability and Resilience at NeighborWorks America, who designed the lab.
And that's exactly what they did, meeting to have in-depth conversations with 20 experts including Ramsey Cohen of Clayton Homes, Colin Higgins of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, Kate de la Garza of Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services and Teena Johnson of Codman Square Development Corp. And it allowed them to talk to each other about potential innovations.
Alfred Arzuaga of Orlando Neighborhood Improvement Corp., summed it up this way: “Learning about innovations that other folks are doing helps us innovate back at home.”
