What comes next
The ideas reshaping how communities house working families — and what the early evidence actually shows. Trends are labeled as trends; nothing here is a prediction dressed up as fact.
The Future of Affordable and Workforce Housing
The trends reshaping affordable and workforce housing: zoning reform, ADUs, factory-built homes, office conversions, employer and social housing, and new federal laws.
Zoning Reform and the YIMBY Movement
How Minneapolis, Oregon, California, Montana and Texas rewrote zoning to allow more homes, what the early evidence shows, and what critics say.
Factory-Built Housing: Modular, Manufactured and Panelized
Manufactured, modular and panelized homes are all built in factories but follow different codes. See the evidence on cost, speed, financing, zoning and new law.
Office-to-Residential Conversions
Why office vacancies rose, which buildings can become apartments, what cities offer developers, and how many homes conversions have actually produced.
Social Housing Models: Vienna, Singapore and U.S. Experiments
How social housing works in Vienna and Singapore, and what U.S. public developers in Montgomery County, Seattle and other places are borrowing from them.
Ideas to know
- Missing Middle Housing
Small multi-unit or clustered homes, such as duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses and cottage courts, built at roughly the size of a detached house. Zoning has made them rare in many U.S. neighborhoods.
- Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU)
A small, self-contained home, with its own kitchen, bathroom and sleeping area, on the same lot as a main house. It can be inside the house, attached to it, or a separate backyard building.
- Modular Housing
Housing built as finished three-dimensional sections in a factory, then trucked to the site and joined on a permanent foundation, generally to the same state or local building code as a site-built home.
- Manufactured Housing
Homes built in a factory to a single national HUD construction code, then transported to a site in one or more sections. Federal law defines them by size and preempts local building codes for them.
- Adaptive Reuse
Converting an existing building designed for another purpose, such as an office, school, hotel, factory, or warehouse, into housing rather than demolishing it and building new.
- By-Right Development
Housing or other construction that local staff must approve without a public hearing, variance or discretionary vote, because the project meets all of the written zoning and building standards that already apply to the site.
- Upzoning
A change to zoning rules that allows more housing or larger buildings on a piece of land than before, for example by permitting fourplexes where only single-family houses were allowed or by raising height limits.
- YIMBY
Short for 'Yes In My Back Yard': a pro-housing movement and political stance that supports building more homes of all kinds, including in established neighborhoods, mainly by loosening zoning and permitting rules.
- Social Housing
Housing owned or controlled by public agencies, nonprofits or cooperatives and kept permanently outside the speculative market, often open to a broad mix of incomes rather than only the poorest households.
- Employer-Assisted Housing
Help that an employer gives its workers to buy, rent or live in homes near their jobs, such as down payment grants, forgivable loans, rental help, or housing the employer builds or finances.
- Community Land Trust (CLT)
A nonprofit, community-governed organization that owns land permanently and leases it to homeowners or housing providers, using a long-term ground lease and resale limits to keep homes affordable for one buyer after another.
- Tiny House
A very small dwelling, defined in the model International Residential Code as 400 square feet or less excluding lofts, built either on a permanent foundation or on a wheeled trailer.