3 unexpected ways to solve the housing crisis

This blog post was authored by Megha Sinha, AICP, LEED AP, Principal and Firmwide Urban Environments Practice Leader; and Kim Way, PLA, ASLA, Principal and Lead Planner and Urban Designer, NBBJ.

The world is grappling with a housing crisis. An estimated 1.6 billion people, or one-fifth of the world’s population, lack access to adequate housing. The US alone is short between four and seven million homes. This deficit drives up prices, with the cost to purchase a home increasing approximately 40% and rental prices 20% to 30%. 

But while government-subsidized affordable homes play a critical role, they alone cannot solve the problem. Unexpected solutions that prioritize cost-driven attainable housing—for example, employer-provided housing and inclusive zoning—are increasingly important. Below, we offer three ideas to embrace workforce and multi-family housing in and across all our communities.  

1. Look to Employers to House Their Workforce  

The rising cost of homes across the country means that organizations like universities and hospitals now provide financially attainable places for their employees to live. Community supply of housing and other live-work-play amenities has become an issue of recruitment and retention, critical to the success of institutions and the communities around them.  

For example, healthcare organizations are strategizing ways to provide safe, community-driven housing for nursing and maintenance staff, medical technicians and students. Our client, Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH, has invested heavily in the surrounding neighborhood through their Healthy Homes program, buying older houses and renovating them or redeveloping and building new entry-level and affordable rental homes for hospital employees while at the same time addressing population health. 

Universities are also thinking creatively about places for their faculty and staff to live. As part of NBBJ's campus planning for a current university client, we identified student dorms that can be converted to staff housing and set aside land on campus to build additional workforce housing in the future. Universities are also addressing the need for both student and workforce housing through public-private partnerships, or P3s, with developers. These mutually beneficial P3s allow universities to receive necessary funding and expertise from developers to make needed projects—like housing—happen, while developers can leverage a university’s community ties to make longer-term investments, ensuring higher-quality outcomes and more opportunities for revenue.

2. Replace Restrictive Zoning with Inclusive Communities

A major barrier to building more housing is single use or restrictive zoning, as it limits both land use and the kind of residential units that can be built. Legalizing multi-family housing throughout our communities is the single most effective way to fill the housing supply gap. It also happens to be a sustainable response to our historically resource-intensive sprawl pattern of community development.  

A diversity of building densities and uses also enables the creation of new urban places and neighborhoods. An example is the Southwestern Medical District in Dallas, TX, where, rather than the traditional singular use perspective, the district approaches development from a mindset of “placetypes.” Institutional campus, community mixed-use and city residential are all examples of placetypes proposed within the district to include multi-family residential along with a variety of other land uses. 

Restrictive zoning also presents challenges for developers and lenders. It’s risky for a developer to place all their investment in one single use, and lenders often shy away from loaning to developers for the same reason. Recently, funders have capped density, limiting the number and types of residential units that developers can build on a property to avoid over-ledgering investment in a single asset. By contrast, a mixed-use development helps both developer and lenders diversify uses and funding resources.

3. Change the Stigma around Affordable Housing  

Years of NIMBYism and fear of bringing down property values, crowding neighborhoods and burdening school districts has created a stigma around affordable housing. As planners, it is our responsibility to dispel the myths by facilitating conversations in planning meetings and community outreach, and by listening, educating and sharing examples of affordable housing done right. It may even be time to shed “affordable housing” from the planner’s lexicon and replace it with more accurate and nuanced terms—for example, workforce housing, senior housing, live/work units, tiny homes, etc.  

As designers, our response is to build simple, beautiful, contextually sensitive and place-based housing, irrespective of the price point. Increased adoption of methods like prefabrication and assembly line production could reduce costs by 40% and time to build by 50%, while also streamlining the approvals process and alleviating many of the concerns related to the affordable housing typology.

Normalizing smaller lots and homes is another piece of the puzzle. We advocate for a sea change in neighborhood design guidelines, promoting small lots and higher density units organized into a community supported by amenities and placemaking. 

The Ponderosa Mobile Home Estates in Dublin, OH, starts to employ this unique model. In this desirable, well-planned and well-maintained manufactured home community, residents who can no longer cope with independent living are moving out of the age-restricted community, making their outdated units candidates for redevelopment. To infuse vitality and reinvestment rather than let this affordable community deteriorate, developers have purchased the land and, as the unit owners leave the community or decide to sell, the existing manufactured home units are removed and replaced with contemporary prefabricated units. Taking this idea even further, the community has been planned into a new, larger mixed-use neighborhood and integrated into the broader Dublin community by introducing new streets, parks, landscape amenities and commercial services. 

Though America’s housing crisis is undoubtedly complex, our work with clients and communities points to solutions that prioritize inclusive land use and zoning policies, and an approach to designing and building attainable housing that reflects the society and times in which we live.