Housing Supply Accelerator

The American Planning Association (APA) has been a leader in an important effort to address housing affordability. At the APA conference in Minneapolis in 2024, a session presented the results of their collaboration with the National League of Cities, the National Homebuilders Association, the National Association of Realtors, and the Mortgage Bankers Association in a special partnership initiative, the Housing Supply Accelerator.

As I listened to the session, I was reminded of our successful partnership in Vision North Texas, where the public, private and academic sectors each contributed a different perspective to a creative, shared approach to our region’s growth. Solving complex problems requires that all the players are at the table to examine choices and develop solutions that won’t end up with unintended consequences. The session also underscored the challenges of this particular problem, such as:

• Why have housing costs gone up so much faster than incomes?
• What factors contribute to the increased cost of new housing – land costs, size of house, design or amenities included, regulations, market economics and more?
• Will affordability be helped or hurt by efforts that maintain and improve existing homes and neighborhoods?
• How can solutions be designed that will work for people in different situations – the elderly, families with young children, those with disabilities, multi-generational households and more?
• What solutions work where, since something that works in a major urban area might not be effective in a small community, and vice versa?

Soon after this presentation, the Housing Supply Accelerator released its “Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook”. This will be a really important and useful tool in addressing a problem that affects so many people, their communities and their choices.