D.C.-based developer Neighborhood Development Co. is shutting down after 25 years of building affordable housing, attributing the move to today's difficult market conditions. 

The company announced the news on its website with a message dated Aug. 23, saying it was “ending its operations and the operations of its affiliates” as of September 30. The announcement doesn't appear to have been widely distributed or previously reported. 

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Research confirms that there are large benefits in saying yes to tall buildings, yes to multifamily structures, yes to dense single-family development and yes to speedy permitting. The growing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement already has high-profile wins in Minnesota, Oregon, California and beyond, but even YIMBY devotees rarely appreciate the scope of the merits of loosening rules on housing.

What would happen if homebuilders could once again freely build until housing prices were driven back down to cost? According to a conservative estimate, prices would ultimately fall about 50 percent on average nationally — with significant, wide-ranging implications.

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Across California, efforts to address the homelessness crisis by building more affordable housing with government money have been plagued by sky-high costs. SDS, an investment firm, is financing construction of its L.A. building, scheduled to open in June, with a $190 million fund it raised to build an estimated 2,000 units for formerly homeless people in the city with mental-health and other medical needs. It is one of several such efforts venturing into an affordable-housing market that for decades has been dominated by developers and nonprofits that cobble together public funding and typically move at a snail’s pace.

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For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals. But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.

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Taking stock of the housing crisis in D.C. and across the country, it’s not difficult to see that something has to change: As housing and living costs rise, more people than ever are spending at least half of their income on rent. More than one in ten D.C. residents face housing insecurity, and demand for housing programs, like emergency rental assistance, remains sky-high.

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In the heart of New York City's housing crisis lies a challenge: how to provide adequate homes for its growing population without compromising the city's unique character. The solution may not be as daunting as it seems. My architecture firm, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, collaborated with Times Opinion to envision a future that accommodates the city's need for housing while preserving its iconic skyline and neighborhood integrity.

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Structures like tenements on the Lower East Side, brownstones in Brooklyn Heights, and quaint buildings in Astoria not only tell a story of my ancestry but also reflect a broader narrative of the city's evolution. Yet, this preservation of the physical city comes at a cost. The same buildings that connect us to New York's rich history are also part of a complex web of laws and regulations that hinder new construction, contributing to the city's acute housing shortage.

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The pandemic forced American cities to make such transformations, temporarily. They turned sidewalks into restaurants, parks into hospitals, streets into open spaces. Now on a lasting and larger scale, they will need to convert offices into apartments, hotels into affordable housing, curb parking into bike lanes, roadways into transit routes, office parks into real neighborhoods.

“If these last few years have taught us anything,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at N.Y.U., “it’s the need for flexibility, the need to be open to surprise in the way we’re going to use space.”

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Los Angeles is hardly the only American city to struggle with homelessness, but its homeless population is disproportionately large, and about 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population lives in California. As a result, Los Angeles is a kind of large-scale test case for which solutions work and which don’t.

For years, local leaders and advocates working on homelessness solutions have bemoaned a lack of urgency and coordination across Los Angeles, where the city and county have separate but overlapping governments.

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San Antonio, the most impoverished major city in the country, according to census data, has enacted policies to help low-income renters, including a $150 million bond issue to support affordable housing construction and a Strategic Housing Implementation Plan. Before the pandemic, the wait list for public housing in San Antonio was roughly 35,000 families, earning an average of $11,000 annually, said Ed Hinojosa Jr., president and chief executive of Opportunity Home, the city’s housing authority. Today, it’s 95,000.

“The need has never been as high as it is now,” Mr. Hinojosa said. “And with the trends we’re seeing, it’s just going to keep growing.”

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Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it? Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor.

In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.

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The U.S. shortage of affordable housing, bad enough before the pandemic, has only gotten worse since 2020, according to a new report by Moody's Analytics. Since then, a combination of factors have conspired to eliminate 500,000 units for extremely low-income renters nationwide, or about 8% of the total stock.

Many affordable housing properties for that income group, which were funded via Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, or LIHTCs, have reached the end of their 30-year compliance period in the last few years. At the end of that period, the property owners have the option of converting their units to market rate.

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Homelessness surged across the Washington region by 18 percent in the past year, with the greatest increases in the suburbs, according to data released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

The D.C. region joins a growing list of cities that are seeing similar spikes, which coincided with the end of pandemic relief programs and stubbornly high inflation.

“We are seeing these increases all over the country,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “What we are also seeing is a real criminalization and villainizing of the homeless, which is something I haven’t seen in my 30 years in this field.”

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If there’s a building in America, a local government has decided the number of parking spaces it needs. But these rules not only overestimated the amount of parking that was needed, they created a society that virtually demanded a car to conduct daily life. America has a parking problem. We’ve built millions of parking spaces we don’t need. Each one costs us.

Parking minimums shape your entire life even if you don’t realize it, from the size of your rent check to the length of your commute to how many friends live nearby. Requiring businesses to include copious parking spots raises the cost of construction and the amount of land needed, codifying sprawl.

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Zoning codes established roughly a century ago were meant to protect residents from the impacts of industrial and commercial developments, but they were also used to enforce segregation. Those regulations have contributed in large part to the current housing shortage, and experts argue that it’s time for reforms. 

As the nation confronts a severe housing crisis, the Biden administration is calling on local governments to revisit outdated zoning policies that slow development.  A recent report from the Urban Land Institute highlights the zoning strategies cities are using to bolster housing development equitably and sustainably, including complete overhauls of single-family regulations and reductions of lot size minimums.  

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The housing crisis in New York State has locked out middle-class families and young people from homeownership, left hundreds of thousands burdened with high rents, and sent tens of thousands of working people into public shelters. Of 3.43 million renters in the state, more than half, roughly 1.7 million, spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Yet instead of strengthening Ms. Hochul’s housing plan, the State Senate and Assembly last week offered proposals that would gut it.

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As homelessness overwhelms downtown Phoenix, a small business wonders how long it can hang on. In recent years, the city has been hit by a housing crisis, a mental health crisis, and an opioid epidemic, resulting in one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with over 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. Read about the experiences of Joe and Debbie Faillace, owners of Old Station Subs in Phoenix, Arizona. With a rising homeless population and a lack of affordable housing, the Faillaces have been struggling to keep their business running amidst the chaos and suffering caused by this humanitarian crisis.

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DC is 70% of the way towards meeting Mayor Muriel Bowser's goal of producing 36,000 new housing units by 2025. Approximately 25,000 units delivered between January 2019 and September 2022, per the latest data available on the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) dashboard. This represents 69% of the desired total. A report released in 2019 further specified affordable housing production goals for each of the city's ten planning areas. The graphic above details where those areas are with progress towards housing production.

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