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The housing crisis in America has been growing for decades. Our nation has careened from one crisis to another, reacting naturally but myopically instead of addressing the structural challenges facing the housing system. Today, the housing crisis has ballooned: One in three households are cost-burdened, home prices have doubled in the last decade, and homelessness has reached a record high. Our affordable housing programs cannot keep up with the need, and the private sector alone is not satisfying all the housing demand.
In Utah, Atlanta, and Cleveland, we are treating the housing crisis like a true crisis. State and local governments have more capacity, capital, and power at their disposal than is first apparent, but it is still far from enough. What Americans need is a holistic evaluation of the current interventions and the elevation of those that work best.
We cannot wait for the federal government. Communities are acting aggressively to address the housing crisis in their own backyards. But they lack the unifying direction that can only come from a well-reasoned, thoughtful approach to our structural challenges. That is why we—a bipartisan, public-private sector group composed of a Republican governor, two Democratic mayors, and the president of a bank-based Community Development Corporation—have come together to form the National Housing Crisis Task Force.
Joining us in this ambitious endeavor are 24 colleagues: practitioners from across the country who are addressing the housing crisis through their leadership roles in government, business, and nonprofits. We are also engaging with the research community to ground our recommendations in the best available evidence.
Collectively, we are working to address the housing crisis in our communities—from incentivizing the construction of starter homes in Utah; to taking a new approach to public land development with over 40 public sites underway in Atlanta; to making changes to the regulatory environment around rental and vacant properties in Cleveland; to deploying Fifth Third's Empowering Black Futures Neighborhood Investment Program, which creates and implements innovative place-based strategies to effect positive change in nine historically disinvested neighborhoods across the Bank's 11-state footprint. These and similar efforts have the power to alleviate the housing crisis in the areas we represent, but they can only be transformative if they are replicated and scaled nationwide.
The Task Force is identifying transformative and implementable innovations in the housing ecosystem related to public land, capital, construction, regulation, and governance. We will also create clear pathways to scaling these innovations to ensure national impact. Not all communities have the same challenges; our goal is to provide solutions that allow them access to the tools that will best address their needs.
We will uplift the innovations that are most likely to transform the housing ecosystem in the U.S. so that people of all incomes can afford to live in the places they wish to call home. We need to create the kind of opportunity our Founders envisioned, so that everyone can participate in the American Dream.
The current presidential administration has put forward proposals to address the housing crisis. These are welcome, but we'll need to do even more if we are to truly face this crisis head on. The federal government must move faster to expand the toolbox and incentivize policies that work. In the last few weeks, affordable housing has become a key issue in the presidential election. This is the first time in a generation that housing has been this heavily featured in a presidential campaign. We must ensure that housing continues to stay at the forefront and that we meet this moment, together.
Our nation has a long history of rising to the occasion when confronted with a crisis. From war to economic unrest, pandemics to environmental disasters, we band together to find real solutions. We also have historical examples of the federal government addressing past housing crises with the Federal Housing Administration, Low Income Housing Tax Credits, Public Housing Authorities, and more. We are calling on the federal government to engage more deeply with the private sector to streamline tax incentives, provide support for solutions that will spur innovation in the construction sector, address the rapid deterioration in the insurance markets, and utilize its full powers to scale local innovations.
Every day, we see how Americans of all walks of life are affected by the housing crisis, from those struggling without a home to those who can barely scrape by for rent. Within the next month, the Task Force will be putting out a national policy agenda rooted in local action that we believe the next administration should include in a first 100-day plan.
Justin Bibb is mayor of Cleveland. Spencer Cox is governor of Utah. Andre Dickens is mayor of Atlanta. Susan Thomas is president of Fifth Third Community Development Corporation.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
