By John Lettieri
Today, we’re launching a new research and policy initiative at the Economic Innovation Group dedicated to housing supply and affordability.
This marks a sustained commitment to one of the defining challenges of our time: America simply does not build enough homes.
The consequences are everywhere. Survey after survey reveals deep frustration with the cost of living — and housing is the focal point. Families are priced out of the places where they want to live. Workers are locked out of the regions with the best jobs. Young people delay starting families because they don’t believe they can afford them. And the nation’s economy suffers from persistently weaker growth.
Housing has become the binding constraint on American opportunity.
At EIG, we’ve spent the past decade advancing ideas to tackle the country’s most pressing economic issues — and we’re not new to the housing arena. Our very first initiative, Opportunity Zones, has proven to be one of the most significant housing supply policies enacted in decades. But while Opportunity Zones demonstrated that federal policy can meaningfully expand housing supply when incentives are designed correctly, far more is needed to address the true scale of the national housing crisis.
EIG will approach our housing work the same way we approach everything else: grounded in rigorous research, focused on solutions that scale, and committed to advancing big ideas that align with how markets work in the real world.
Two key assumptions will set our efforts apart from many others. First, the key to housing affordability is much greater housing supply of all types. Focusing on “affordable housing” alone is not the way to make housing markets affordable. And second, while the most severe bottlenecks to housing supply are local, our work will be primarily centered on how federal policy can be a catalyst for reform. The federal government doesn’t control zoning, but it can and must do significantly more to shape incentives to build at the necessary scale.
To that end, we released a new paper today on how federal lawmakers can design Right to Build Zones (RBZs), a bold proposal to help municipalities unlock housing supply while preserving local control. Crucially, RBZs reflect EIG’s conviction that the best policy interventions are ones that better enable markets to solve societal problems without micromanaging outcomes.
Solving the housing shortage won’t happen overnight. It certainly won’t happen without resistance. But restoring America’s capacity to build is essential to delivering both vigorous economic growth and broad-based opportunity. Only housing abundance can ensure that workers can accept jobs that were once beyond their reach, and that families can afford to live in places they’re proud to call home.
