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Over the past several years, the cost of housing has vaulted atop many Americans’ lists for what is driving our current affordability crisis. Much of the debate around how to lower housing costs has centered around two options: regulatory reforms (e.g., zoning changes, minimum lot sizes, or parking requirements) or financial reforms (e.g., making it cheaper to build housing). While the former has received a lot of needed attention through the abundance movement, the latter deserves an equal amount of focus: irrespective of these regulatory barriers, it has become too expensive to build.

As the U.S. grapples with a multi layered housing crisis, the need for states to act strategically and mobilize public, private and civic resources has never been higher.  In the near term, that includes shaping the next round of Opportunity Zones. Yes, Opportunity Zones.

As the U.S. grapples with a housing affordability crisis, the single-minded focus of policymakers, practitioners and advocates alike is on boosting housing production to redress the radical mismatch between housing demand and supply that has emerged across the country. The metric of this era for decisionmakers, whether at the national, state or local level, is “housing units built.”

My strong conviction is that “units built” is not the only metric that the nation should focus on. The totalizing focus on “new units” causes us to lose sight of the impact that housing — its design, its location, its tenant mix — has on life opportunities and social progress.

Readers of this newsletter know that I focus repeatedly on the reality that states, counties, and cities are the vanguard of problem solving for the foreseeable future. The federal government is mired in a level of partisan combat that has precedents in U.S. history but takes on new meaning in a world where Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pithy maxim — “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts” — no longer holds.

To start off the year we argued that the right question on housing isn’t “what should we do?” but rather “which housing crisis are we solving?” In that piece we identified seven intersecting housing challenges — from zoning reform to construction methods to maintenance and operations— and cautioned against over-indexing on any single one.

The housing crisis has reached global proportions. Despite significant variation in economic growth, regulatory environments, and level of state intervention, home prices and rents have risen substantially across most OECD countries over the past decade. Figure 1, below, shows that almost all OECD countries have home prices above 2015 levels, with some — such as the United States — up nearly 80% in only a decade. The increase in housing costs is having significant political reverberations. In the US, for example, affordability is the top issue concerning voters as the country enters the 2026 midterms.

As the new year unfolds, there are few issues attracting as much attention at the city, county and state level as housing. Housing policy is having one of those rare moments: a consensus across communities large and small, markets hot and cold, Democratic and Republican administrations alike, that the housing challenge must be solved and must be solved from the ground up given the unreliable and inconsistent actions of the federal government.

I started the New Year last week by attending a multi-day Symposium on Institutional Innovation in Cities at the Bloomberg Center on Cities at Harvard University. The gathering was curated by the remarkable people who power the Harvard Center (notably Jorrit de Jong, Mark Moore, Stacy Richardson, Quinton Mayne and Kimberly Leary) as well as two of the brilliant founders of The Institutional Architecture Lab (Sir Geoff Mulgan and Juha Leppänen).

In July 2018, Jeremy Nowak and I launched a Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. The Lab had the active support and encouragement of John Fry, then President of Drexel and a good friend of both of ours. Earlier that year, Jeremy and I had co-authored The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism, which contended that cities and metropolitan areas had emerged as the vanguard of problem solving in the United States for one overarching reason: they were not just governments but networks of institutions and leaders that cut across sectors as well as jurisdictional and disciplinary lines.

Across the United States, local governments are facing regional-scale crises with municipal-sized tools. Housing, homelessness, infrastructure, and climate challenges have all outgrown the fiscal and institutional reach of any single city. Federal dollars that once underwrote public works and affordable housing have thinned out, while expectations for local governments have only expanded. The result is a generational shift toward what we call the New Localism: a world in which cities and metropolitan regions must design, finance, and deliver their own solutions.

In our earlier work, Organizing for Impact: Lessons from Atlanta’s Housing Strike Force, we argued that success depends as much on how cities organize as on what they choose to do. Atlanta’s experience showed that systems change requires new institutions (a public asset corporation to build mixed income housing on public land) and new capital (raised via municipal bonds, public asset disposition and the aggregation of private/philanthropic resources). But as the scale of our challenges continues to grow, that same logic must now extend beyond the boundaries of individual cities.