Federal Policy Broke the Housing Market. It Won’t Fix Things Now.
Last week’s National Housing Supply Summit promised an exchange of ideas between industry leaders and policymakers. Attendees were hopeful that conversations at the National Housing Center would illuminate a clear path forward with policy and action. Something they could package and deliver to the White House or Congress to finally tackle America’s housing crisis.
Yet, as takeaways from the event flood our feeds—usually summarized in tidy lists of top-down "solutions" veiled in bottom-up language and masquerading as grassroots approaches—one thing is abundantly clear: federal policies alone will never build the homes we need.
The University of Texas at Austin's Civitas Institute agrees: “Our case studies and other research confirm the observation by Chuck Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, 'We have to move beyond the narrow, almost futile task of making affordable housing and start working on the broader and more meaningful effort of making housing affordable.' ... a handful of subsidized units here or there does nothing to make housing broadly affordable.”
The hard truth is this: The housing crisis wasn’t created by a lack of federal action—it was created by decades of misguided federal interventions, restrictive local zoning, and incentives that favor large-scale developers and institutional investors over everyday citizens.
Expecting Washington to fix the problems Washington helped create isn’t optimism; it’s a paradox.
Consider that nearly every federal housing effort of the past several decades—well-intentioned though they may be—has often inadvertently made building housing more complicated, bureaucratic and costly at the local level. Federal “solutions” frequently become local headaches, layering regulations and creating barriers that communities then have to unravel on their own.
If we’re serious about increasing housing production, the answer won’t be found in another sweeping act of Congress. It will be found block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Communities need to reject reliance on federal interventions that are slow to come and quick to complicate. Instead, it’s time to embrace an incremental, bottom-up approach that empowers residents, local entrepreneurs and small-scale builders to step forward.
Rather than wait for a national blueprint, we need local leaders who are willing to:
Undo the harm of overly prescriptive zoning rules that stifle creative, incremental growth.
Reform outdated building codes and parking mandates that add unnecessary costs to every housing project.
Encourage small-scale, community-driven development rather than exclusively focusing on large projects funded through federal subsidies.
Cities that are succeeding aren’t waiting for direction from Washington—they’re giving direction to Washington, showing that small, local moves can make housing more abundant, affordable and accessible.
Let’s stop looking upward for solutions that can only be found at ground level. Change starts when cities realize they’re the master developers of their own futures—not Congress.
That’s why we put together “The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform.” It breaks down the six most impactful code reforms that city officials can implement today, no federal policies required. Once you’ve implemented the reforms, celebrate your city’s progress by adding it to the map of Housing-Ready Cities.
Edward Erfurt is the Chief Technical Advisor at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.