Making Housing More Affordable: Challenges and Collaborative Solutions

By David Fairman, Tania Carlone, Ona Ferguson, Abby Fullem, Ryan Golten, and Catherine Morris

In the areas of the United States with the most economic opportunity, the high cost of housing takes too much of renters’ paychecks, forcing hard choices on working people. It puts homeownership out of reach for many middle-class families. Over time, it can erode economic opportunities, as businesses start to relocate to places where living costs and wages are lower. Cracking the challenge of housing affordability can provide big benefits for people and the economy. But housing problems are complex, controversial, and sometimes polarizing. Creating workable solutions requires collaboration among government, business, and community groups to diagnose causes, develop options, and build political will for change. 

In the past several years, CBI has been facilitating collaboration on housing challenges in high-cost cities, regions, and states. From downtown Palo Alto to Denver, the Hudson River Valley, and the state of Massachusetts, we have seen how affordability crises have spurred new initiatives and partnerships. The following snapshots of our work from city- to regional- and state-level give more detail on housing challenges, consensus building approaches, and solutions. We continue to learn from this work and welcome insights from others involved in affordable housing collaborations around the country.

Searching for Affordable Housing Development Options in Palo Alto’s Downtown

California has some of the nation's highest home values and rents, which contribute to staggering homelessness and a situation where more than half of the state's renters and four in ten homeowners spend over 30% of their household income on housing. In Palo Alto, one of the principal cities in Silicon Valley, median home prices exceed $3.6 million for single-family homes and downtown land values are driven by competition with highly profitable office uses, creating affordability challenges. Local restrictive development standards compound the difficulty of producing financially feasible housing projects, particularly downtown, where most parcels are small and few are available for development. The mismatch between housing supply and demand is stark: while 35% of jobs in Palo Alto pay wages qualifying workers for very low- or low-income housing, only 12% of permitted units since 2018 were affordable, forcing many lower-wage workers to commute from increasingly distant locations and contributing to regional patterns of economic and racial segregation. Downtown has seen virtually no residential growth over the past decade.

The city’s Downtown Housing Plan aims to change that. Funded by an $800,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the new plan strives to encourage more housing in Palo Alto’s downtown, its most transit-rich area. The Downtown Housing Plan’s project team conducted an analysis of existing land use, mobility, housing, economic contexts, services, utilities and infrastructure, and equity. As part of the analysis, CBI led a stakeholder assessment, focus groups, and surveys of underrepresented groups to explore community perspectives on the opportunities and constraints for increasing housing production in downtown Palo Alto. And CBI continues to work with the Community Advisory Group to advise on planning solutions for these challenges.

Even within the constraints of an intense housing crisis and amid changing state housing legislation, this process has helped participants develop a sense of possibilities. One potential solution is capitalizing on city-owned surface parking lots in downtown for affordable housing development—this would offer advantages such as lower land acquisition costs and greater control over development outcomes. Moving forward on this and other solutions will require coordinated action and new partnerships among longtime property owners, developers, the city, advocacy groups, and community members to reduce construction costs, reform restrictive local zoning standards, and streamline approval processes. It will be crucial, too, to strike a balance between increased density and the historical character of downtown while meeting community needs for housing across all income levels. The participatory, balanced, wide-ranging planning process in Palo Alto demonstrates how ongoing collaboration can help the city respond to this crisis.

A Transparent, Expansive Effort to Tackle Denver’s Housing Crisis

Like other cities, Denver, Colorado, has a housing crisis. The causes include low supply of housing; rapid increases in the cost of land, labor, and materials; and displacement of renters when their units are converted for ownership. In 2020, Denver sought to address the crisis through an ambitious Expanding Housing Affordability effort (EHA), which would establish market incentives for building affordable housing units into new development; in 2022, the City undertook a similar effort to establish zoning code updates that would increase the number of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU).

After criticism around past land use and housing policy efforts, the City was committed to a robust stakeholder and public engagement process. This led to the creation of stakeholder advisory committees for the EHA and ADU initiatives, which included neighborhood leaders, housing advocates, developers, and City Council members. CBI facilitated both committees, which were charged with developing consensus recommendations to the City Council. The City broadened its outreach through focus groups; listening office hours; surveys; and public meetings at key milestones before decisions were made. Overall, the city’s outreach was successful for a number of important reasons:

●      transparency, by making the Advisory Committee process open to the public and recorded, allowing for public input at every meeting;

●      a compelling case for the need for affordable housing, including compelling graphics to tell the story;

●      joint fact finding—there was rigorous financial analysis that used an independent contractor who vetted assumptions with the advisory committee;

●      an iterative process: staff proposals and options were put through multiple rounds of discussion with the Advisory Committee and were very explicit about changes made in response; and

●      extensive stakeholder and decisionmaker consultation and briefings on how the input was shaping the proposal to City Council and the Advisory Committee.

The year-long EHA process resulted in a complex set of requirements beginning with a minimum number of affordable housing units to be incorporated in new development, tailored to the housing market in different parts of the city. For those developers willing to build more than the minimum, the city adopted an incentive zoning ordinance that allows some flexibility on building height, parking, and linkage fees in return. The new policy also increased “linkage fees” paid on all new development. The fee, originally set in 2017, is funneled into a fund to address housing needs of lowest income residents.

To remove barriers to ADU construction and create design standards relevant to different Denver neighborhoods, the City adopted zoning code revisions in 2024 that allow ADUs in all residential areas of the city.

While it is considered too early to see the results of EHA, changes are already evident in the ADU market where permits are on the rise. 

Pursuing Affordability and Sustainability in New York’s Hudson Valley

A lack of affordable housing has been making life in New York’s Hudson River Valley increasingly difficult. The causes are many: single family sprawl over denser, smart growth development; the COVID-19 real estate boom; vulnerable existing rental housing; and the perception that affordable housing brings unwanted change. These factors have contributed to untenable real estate appreciation, the displacement of low-income communities with high proportions of Black and Latino households, and a dwindling housing stock for families with modest incomes regardless of race or ethnicity. And there’s a related ecological crisis. The Hudson River, hunting and fishing areas, critical habitat, and community open spaces are increasingly at risk due to unfettered real estate development. Furthermore, housing is being built in areas increasingly prone to flooding, and green space in urban areas is scarce.

Affordable housing organizations and conservation land trust organizations are working in region to further the development of affordable housing and conservation of land. Historically, these types of organizations have diverged philosophically over development and concretely on specific parcels. Many now realize, however, that they have shared interests in affordable land, smart development, and urban green space, and that their siloed approaches are not enough. The Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing & Conservation—a coalition of eight affordable housing not-for-profits and eight conservation not-for-profits—was formed to convene organizations that want to work together to identify shared interests, collaborate on specific projects, and jointly advocate for municipal and state policy changes.

CBI has facilitated this coalition since its inception. Initially, this meant focusing on helping members identify shared interests, surface challenges, and seek opportunities for joint project development and advocacy. Members have jointly delivered presentations at county events and conferences, reviewed each other’s Requests For Proposals, secured grants together, and hosted joint meetings with legislators. The coalition has also resulted in joint affordable housing and conservation projects on specific parcels, most notably the Cookingham Farm project in Red Hook, New York. CBI facilitates the coalition’s municipal working group—which shares advice and recommendations with municipal staff and planning boards—and the policy working group, which has advocated for Community Housing and Preservations Funds and for more cross-sectoral collaboration in state programs and grants.

Helping Massachusetts Unlock Affordable Housing Production

Massachusetts is highly ranked as one of the most attractive places in the country to live, but it also ranks near the top in cost of living. Housing prices are a major factor in that affordability challenge; zoning and environmental rules are key cost drivers. Town zoning generally requires single family homes on larger lots in most buildable areas. State and local environmental rules make it very expensive to build multifamily housing in the remaining available areas. Several years ago, the legislature passed an innovative zoning reform that required most communities in greater Boston to create multi-family zoning districts, with the number of buildable units proportional to their current housing stock. Recently it also provided additional funding for housing development. Neither of these moves, however, has yet sparked enough new housing production to stop prices from continuing to rise.

In 2024, the Governor created the Unlocking Housing Production Commission to propose additional reforms to state and local laws and regulations. The Commission’s 16 members represented state housing, economic and environmental agencies, regional councils of government, municipalities, building and fire code authorities, single- and multi-family housing developers, and advocates for affordable housing and smart growth. CBI facilitated the work of the Commission to develop and propose reforms in four areas: zoning, economic incentives, regulations and permitting, and state-local planning and coordination. Working groups on these issues represented key interests within the Commission, and they also consulted with relevant stakeholder representatives. The Commission as a whole deliberated on the working group proposals, considering their impact on housing production, potential positive and negative impacts on related issues (such as affordability, environment, equity, and cost to the state), and the likely political response. 

In January 2025, the Commission reached agreement on 50 recommendations in these four areas, and the Governor committed to support them. Most notable are significant proposed changes to zoning across the state, requiring each of the state’s 351 cities and towns to choose between a) establishing a multi-family housing district or b) allowing 2-to-4-unit homes by right on all current single-family lots. The Commission also recommended eliminating communities’ ability to make local wetlands protection regulations more stringent than those set by the state’s environmental agency. 

The Commission’s members have advocated with the legislature, and their recommendations on eliminating minimum parking requirements have already been taken up. The political future of the reforms is still uncertain, but the power of the reform package and the strange bedfellows alliances that the Commission created are now new forces at work to solve Massachusetts’s housing challenges.

Lessons from this Work

Housing has social and environmental impacts, so housing solutions often need to be social and environmental solutions, too. Whether the related issue is transit access for workers (Palo Alto), neighborhood preservation (the Hudson River Valley), or environmental conservation (Hudson Valley and Massachusetts), increasing affordability is rarely the only consideration in housing initiatives. That means that stakeholders with a range of interests need to be at the table, analysis needs to look at joint gains and trade-offs across issues, and the process has to be designed as a coalition-building opportunity, not only a housing production or cost control exercise.

Housing solutions need to cross scales and jurisdictions, from neighborhoods to states. Palo Alto’s downtown housing planning process has been driven by California state mandates, a city-wide housing shortage, and downtown employer and worker needs. The Hudson Valley is experiencing the pressures on housing from New York City and has engaged a rich array of local, regional, and state housing and environmental agencies and groups to integrate land conservation and affordable housing development. Massachusetts has needed to develop policy and regulatory proposals to address both the higher-cost metros in the eastern third of the state and the deteriorating housing stock in the central and western portion; it also has had to create new options for sharing zoning and environmental permitting authority among local governments and state agencies. This complexity requires representation and negotiation across jurisdictions and scales, as Massachusetts did through its Unlocking Housing Production Commission.

Hard negotiations can build better relationships and produce creative solutions. In our work, commercial developers and affordable housing advocates have gotten to know each other as people and have found common ground on the need to increase housing production. Tough trade-offs remain over affordable housing set-asides, but solutions that reduce the cost of land (providing lower-cost land on city-owned parking lots in Palo Alto, or as a package deal with a conservation land trust in the Hudson Valley), or reduce production costs (allowing accessory dwelling units in Denver and Massachusetts, or eliminating mandatory minimum parking requirements in Massachusetts and Denver) have made it easier for developers to agree to affordability mandates. Environmental advocates have been willing to support housing expansion when coupled with incentives for higher density, public transit, walking, and biking, and the maintenance of strong protections for environmentally sensitive areas. 

Looking Ahead

Barring a dramatic increase in housing supply or a collapse in the housing market, housing affordability challenges will stay high on the public agenda in most of the country’s high-cost metro areas and states. Because affordability challenges connect to social and environmental issues, and cross scales and jurisdictions, they require negotiation among public and private stakeholders with a mix of common, complementary, and conflicting interests. Collaborative approaches can help build trust and mutual understanding, identify promising solutions, and build coalitions that can shift the political winds in favor of significant reforms. CBI will continue to facilitate consensus building on housing issues across the United States, as we aim to ensure inclusive and effective deliberation and produce high-impact solutions.