The high cost of land in high-opportunity communities is one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when trying to develop affordable housing. Local governments can bypass this barrier by dedicating publicly owned land to affordable housing and pairing it with development subsidies. This can include surface parking lots, unused school buildings, tax-adjudicated property, or land owned by redevelopment or public housing authorities. 

Local Housing Solutions: Use of publicly owned property for affordable housing

In some communities, white people who have accumulated generational wealth, through our historically racist real estate market, are committing to redistribute that wealth, often through home sales. In Portland, some members of the PDX Housing Solidarity Project have sold their homes below the market price to Black and/or Indigenous families. Others have provided direct cash gifts to Black and/or Indigenous families to aid in a home purchase. The sales don’t use realtors or advertise to avoid Fair Housing Act concerns and the group doesn’t handle any money, but acts as a network connecting buyers and sellers. 

PDX Housing Solidarity Project

Short-term rentals (STRs), like those listed on Airbnb or VRBO, typically remove units from the market that would otherwise be available to renters and can drive up the cost to rent, purchase, or maintain a home, while also often contributing to quality of life concerns for neighbors. When STRs remove units from the market, they limit supply and can increase rents. STR investors often compete with first-time homebuyers and are willing to pay above the asking price for properties because of the high nightly rents they can demand. Those higher purchase prices can then raise assessments and taxes for long-time neighboring homeowners. Especially in communities where tourism is a significant sector of the local economy, eliminating or strictly-regulating STRs and the platforms that advertise them can prevent already high housing costs from reaching crisis levels. 

Local Housing Solutions: Regulating Short-Term Rentals

San Francisco Office of Short-Term Rentals

New York City Short-Term Rentals Rules and Laws

Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative’s Short-Term Rentals, Long-Term Impacts: The Corrosion of Housing Access and Affordability in New Orleans

America's criminal legal system has a disparate impact on Black and Brown people at every step in the process. The result is that criminal background screening in rental housing often operates as a proxy for racial discrimination. Fair chance in housing policies are designed to offer people with criminal records a fair chance at a place to call home while simultaneously reducing homelessness and recidivism. 

Vera Institute of Justice: Opening Doors Initiative

National Housing Law Project: Fair Chance Ordinances, An Advocate’s Toolkit

Seattle’s Fair Chance Housing Ordinance 

Some of the most important ways to remove barriers to entry to exclusive, high-opportunity communities are HCV mobility programs. Typically, successful programs include at least three elements, in addition to a Source of Income anti-discrimination law, also described in this list. Those three elements are Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMR) or Exception Payment Standards, landlord incentives, and mobility counseling. Housing authorities, which administer the HCV program, can use SAFMR or Exception Payment Standards to set the amount a voucher will pay a landlord based on the average rents in the zip code, rather than the metro area. This ensures that in areas with higher rents, a voucher will have a better chance of being able to actually cover that rent. Research shows that landlord incentives, like lease-up bonuses paid by the housing authority to the landlord when a family with a voucher signs a lease in a high-opportunity neighborhood, prove very successful in ensuring voucher holders can access these areas. Mobility counseling programs, often run by the housing authority or a nonprofit contractor, provide case management to families with vouchers looking to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. They can include assistance with finding landlords who will accept vouchers, scouting new schools in different neighborhoods, planning out public transportation to jobs, and other similar help. Taken together, these programmatic and policy changes can significantly impact segregation in the voucher program. 

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: A Guide to Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs)

Poverty & Race Research Action Council: Housing Mobility Programs in the U.S. 2022

Local Housing Solutions: Increased voucher payment standards in high-cost areas

Local Housing Solutions: Landlord recruitment and retention

Local Housing Solutions: Mobility counseling for housing choice voucher holders

In exclusionary, high-opportunity communities that are the result of gentrification and displacement, local governments and affordable housing developers can create housing preferences for displaced residents. The preference policy, which moves residents who can prove they previously lived in an area to the top of the list, can apply to multiple housing programs. In Portland, the policy applies to home repair loans, new affordable rental units, and forgivable down payment assistance loans. 

Portland’s North/Northeast Neighborhood Housing Strategy

Inclusionary zoning ordinances typically use a local jurisdiction’s zoning code to require that new construction of luxury rental or condo buildings in high-opportunity areas include a certain percentage of units as affordable. There are important decision points–such as the percentage of affordable units required, the affordability level, the term of affordability, and how “high-opportunity areas” are defined, that often require study and can determine whether an ordinance is successful in creating new affordable units. Additional resources can be found at:

Grounded Solutions Network: Inclusionary Housing

Local Housing Solutions: Inclusionary Zoning

Single-family zoning drives up the cost of housing and often helps to maintain segregation in exclusionary, high-opportunity communities. Allowing builders and homeowners to add accessory dwelling units, often referred to as “mother-in-law units” on the same lot as a single-family home can create more rental options and help older people age-in-place. Local governments should also pursue some sort of subsidy program as well to ensure a significant portion of these new units are actually affordable, because increasing supply alone will not guarantee affordability. Similarly, allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quadruplexes in areas that previously only allowed single-family zoning can also increase the diversity of housing types and open communities to people who were previously kept out. In these new or rehabbed small multi-family dwellings, local governments should also require, or at least incentivize, one of the units to be affordable to truly make progress toward undoing segregation. 

Local Housing Solutions: Accessory Dwelling Units

Local Housing Solutions: Zoning changes to allow for higher residential density

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: A State by State Guide to Zoning Reform

New Orleans allows “Small Multi-Family Affordable” developments in nearly all zoning districts.

In addition to creating more opportunities for renters through inclusionary zoning or eliminating single-family zoning, renter equity programs can also help disproportionately Black and Brown renters in exclusionary, high-opportunity communities build wealth. Renter equity programs were first developed as a way to help renters in affordable housing developments build wealth in exchange for contributing to the upkeep and governance of the property. Renters received equity credits for paying rent on time, attending tenant meetings, or helping to clean common areas. Larger organizations and at least one state are bringing the model to scale by funding the construction or rehab of affordable rental developments and then requiring that any profit the building makes above a certain threshold needed to pay back debt and investors is shared with the tenants of the building. The equity is typically dispersed to tenants through monthly cash rebates. 

Building wealth and community for renters in Cincinnati, OH

Enterprise Renter Wealth Creation Fund

Colorado Affordable Housing Finance Fund and enabling legislation

Source of income (SOI) anti-discrimination ordinances are local or state-wide legislation that bars landlords from discriminating against prospective renters who have a Housing Choice Voucher (“Sec. 8”). Most ordinances also bar discrimination against people accessing other government programs, such as food stamps, disability, or veterans benefits. Ordinances should specifically name housing vouchers as a covered form of income, as some state courts have ruled that unless specifically named, they do not count as a protected source of income. SOI ordinances should also prohibit landlords from setting a minimum income requirement based on the entire rent–instead, any minimum income requirement should be based only on the tenant’s portion of the rent. Enforcement and oversight are also key to the success of these laws. 

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities: Prohibiting Discrimination Against Renters Using Housing Vouchers Improves Results

Urban Institute: State and Local Voucher Protection Laws

Local Housing Solutions: Source of Income Laws

Special Purpose Credit Programs include race-conscious loan programs specifically authorized under the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). They allow a lender to offer assistance to specific groups that would otherwise be denied credit or receive it on less favorable terms. Most SPCPs offer loans or grants to Black and/or Brown first-time homebuyers. It’s possible for SPCPs to assist Black and Brown homebuyers in accessing high-cost, exclusionary housing markets, but it requires a significant amount of assistance per family. 

National Fair Housing Alliance: Special Purpose Credit Programs Toolkit

Washington State’s Covenants Homeownership Account Act

San Diego Black Homebuyers Program