Add To The Blueprint To Address Housing's Affordability Crisis

A "blueprint," by definition, is a guide for making something.

The National Association of Home Builders' "Blueprint to Address the Housing Affordability Crisis," in contrast, seems to be designed more as a proscriptive scorecard of how elected representatives and appointed officials need to change.

1. Eliminate excessive regulations;
2. Promote careers in the skilled trades;
3. Fix building material supply chains and ease costs;
4. Pass federal tax legislation to expand the production of affordable and attainable housing;
5. Overturn inefficient local zoning rules;
6. Alleviate permitting roadblocks;
7. Adopt reasonable and cost-effective building codes;
8. Reduce local impact fees and other upfront taxes associated with housing construction;
9. Make it easier for developers to finance new housing; and
10. Update employment policies to promote flexibility and opportunity.

Who is supposed to do these things – to follow this blueprint – to make a housing market that functions in a way that fulfills the promise of the Housing Act of 1949?

Not homebuilders and their partners? Only policymakers?

If local, county, state, and federal officials would lower policy barriers on the one hand and raise access to policy-driven financial resources on the other, the NAHB's 10-point housing plan would allow builders to do ...

their part to boost housing production to meet the needs of a growing population, make homeownership and renting more affordable, and elevate housing as a national priority." – NAHB

No doubt, overregulation weighs on the residential construction sector, which needs to operate sustainably and profitably as it seeks to provide a full spectrum of product and price options for working households in lower, middle, and upper income groups in communities around the nation. Advocating for the elimination of antiquated regulations, areas of overreach, and rules whose unintended negative consequences eclipse any of their intended benefits is necessary and well-placed.

Advocating for financial and capital changes that would expand homebuilding operators' access to necessary upfront capital is a worthy focus of policy advocacy. This, in turn, could create new private sector investment channels, fostering economic growth and addressing the housing affordability crisis.

What's worrisome, however, is the manifesto's 100% outer focus on what must change in order, the report says, ...

to address the root of the problem – the impediments to increasing the nation’s housing supply."

We'd like to see homebuilders – national, regional, multi-local, and local – add to this blueprint, more specifically with ideas about what impediments in their own processes, practices, and business cultures might be necessary actions to take in a commitment "to do our part."

They might play a major role in solutions for item No. 2 above, "Promote careers in the skilled trades," by putting more of their own skin in the game, building better workplace cultures, and using attraction — vs. compulsion — to strengthen capability.

Item No. 3, "Fix building material supply chains and ease costs," is another big opportunity area for operators to work smarter, leverage shared data, and eliminate costs within their own systems.

More than likely, for each and every one of the 10 barrier-lowering imperatives builders call on policymakers to adopt in this blueprint, there are operational, strategic, tactical, and business-cultural changes builders can and need to evolve to truly and accountably commit to "doing their part."

It's not just the elected and appointed officials that need to work differently to alter the trajectory of a "nationwide shortage of roughly 1.5 million housing units that is making it increasingly difficult for American families to afford to purchase or rent a home."

Housing is that broken. Only everybody – public and private sector – can and will find solutions to fix it.