Special Briefing on Addressing the Housing Crisis: Innovative Solutions from Across America

From repurposing underused office buildings and shopping centers to making sweeping changes in zoning, cities from coast to coast are taking concrete steps to increase housing construction. Moderated by William Glasgall, Volcker Alliance Public Finance Adviser and Penn IUR Fellow, and Susan Wachter, Co-Director of the Penn IUR and Wharton Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance, join our Special Briefing expert panel as we discuss what the nation can do to alleviate housing shortages—one of the most critical issues facing the US economy in 2026. Speakers include: • Hannah Blitzer, Housing Sector Lead, S&P Global Ratings • Eric Goldywn, Program Director and Clinical Assistant Professor, Transportation and Land-Use, Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University • Laurie Goodman, Institute Fellow and Founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center, The Urban Institute • Paul Steenhausen, Principal Fiscal & Policy Analyst, California Legislative Analyst's Office NOTABLE QUOTES Blitzer: “Our view is that the affordable housing sector will continue to grapple with a long-standing imbalance between limited supply and mounting demand. In the last year, home prices have stabilized slightly, but with inflation outpacing wage gains, we do expect the pressure on low-income households will continue to intensify.” Steenhausen: “I have 120 bosses, we like to say, in the Senate and Assembly. What have they been doing about it? There's a number of recent laws that makes it easier to build accessory dwelling units, ADUs, and making it more of a ministerial action if these ADUs meet a set of pre-established criteria, so it's not subject to discretion by local governments.” Goldwyn: “In New York, more than 50% of New Yorkers qualify as rent burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and so we thought maybe we could combine the transportation goals and the housing goals to sort of make a better plan and tackle affordability more directly, so if we want to catalyze development, we think you have to expand the subway as we did more than 100 years ago.” Goodman: “The average family today buying the average house at today's interest rates, putting 3.5% down, will spend 34.7% of their income on their mortgage payments, taxes, and insurance. The average since 2000 has been 28%, so the reason housing is so unaffordable is because we have an acute housing supply shortage, which drives up both home prices and rents.” Goodman: “In 2024, ADUs were close to 20% of new housing units produced in the state of California. The rate of single-family homes with ADUs nationwide is 1.2%. It's 2.9% for California as a whole, and 4.6% for LA. If the country had the same rate of ADUs as California, we'd add 1.5 million units. If we had the same rate as LA, we would add 3 million units. This would go a long way toward closing the supply-demand gap. California has already given us the playbook to do this.” Blitzer: “I think that housing finance agencies are a great example of how states can be funneling more funding towards affordable housing. Often, HFAs are state entities and they're ultimately financially self-sufficient with the bonds they issue, but they do often also have strong relationships with the states that they're in, and in certain states, will get an additional allocation of funding from the state.” Steenhausen: “As far as housing for low-income people and extremely low income in California, there's only 24 units of housing that's available and affordable for every 100 extremely low-income households. And so it's almost like that game when we were kids of musical chairs. There's just not enough chairs, and so I think California needs to make sure we're leveraging the federal tax credits.” Goodman: “The solution to the affordability crisis is more supply. It would obviously be great to build more affordable. That oftentimes requires subsidy, but building more of anything helps bring down prices and rents.”