Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.
Obstacles to housing affordability are everywhere: High construction costs, strict zoning regulations, limited land availability, slow permitting, shrinking subsidies, private profit motives. But there are solutions too.
Bloomberg Philanthropies recently announced it would be giving grants and assistance to up to 30 city halls around the country to emulate strategies that have been successfully implemented in San Diego, Austin and Atlanta, and resulted in boosts to housing production in those places.
In San Diego, the city set a 30-day deadline to review building applications, boosting the rate of permitted housing by 82 percent,
according toBloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Austin promoted “gentle densification” by shrinking minimum property sizes and allowing additional homes, including accessory dwelling units (ADUs), on many single-family lots. Atlanta convened a “housing strike force” that brought together leaders from the city and outside agencies to work together on increasing housing production. Those strategies can and should be adopted by other cities, says James Anderson, who leads the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The program is part of the
Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange, an effort to identify solutions to urban problems and help city leaders adapt them for their own needs. The first cities receiving grants and support for housing solutions are Albuquerque, Alexandria, Charleston, Chattanooga, Cleveland, Columbia, Durham, Louisville, Miami, Nashville, Omaha, Pittsburgh, Providence and San Jose. All have shown some effort to “soften the ground” for housing production through efforts to permit denser development in some areas, Anderson says.
Anderson recently spoke with Governing about how Bloomberg identified solutions and how it expects to help them spread. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Governing: Can you tell me about how you found those solutions specifically? How did you sift through all the things cities are doing on housing production and affordability and decide that these cities and solutions were models for extension?
James Anderson: In the United States today there is no issue higher on mayoral agendas than housing supply. Roughly a year ago we brought together mayors from small towns and large cities, Republican and Democratic mayors alike, and they were uniform in talking about the desire to find new and better ways to unlock supply. Our team spent the better part of last year finding those cities that had lighthouse examples where clear, practical, concrete interventions unlocked the flow of permits and supply. And we have elevated those three ideas.
We undertook a bunch of different tactics all at once. We did a serious review of the academic literature to understand what evidence existed around which supply strategies work. (By the way, not a ton anywhere.) We talked with housing experts, nonprofits, private developers, practitioners working in very different contexts across the United States to understand what they were seeing and what was exciting them. We galvanized our existing network of local leaders. We convened mayors. We called their housing leads. We spoke with their chiefs of staff. We interviewed the heck out of them to find out where they were starting to get traction and what evidence they had to support it.
Through all those different conversations, we started hearing San Diego a lot. We started hearing Atlanta and Austin a lot. We took the time to go there, to dive deep, to understand what was rhetoric and what was real and what really made the difference in these places that could potentially make a difference elsewhere. That is the art and science of idea-spreading: Understanding what in the model really matters, what’s a core component and what’s optional, what’s typically not talked about in the press releases that makes implementation really challenging, and whether we have a strong sense that those barriers to implementation can be overcome in other places.
San Diego took this approach of expediting its review of building applications. This is related to the permitting reform that has been a hot topic among cities and states and to an extent the federal government lately. What has made the approach in San Diego work especially well?
Too many city halls think that it’s simply a job for technology. Mayor Todd Gloria recognized that it was both a leadership challenge and a technology challenge, and that you can’t reap the benefits of the technological upgrades without an equal commitment to leading differently and managing time differently within the bureaucracy.
Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
In government, people take all of the time that they’re afforded. It’s the nature of the beast. Mayor Gloria said, “We can go faster.” He issued an executive order that said we can do something that’s now taking us 100 days in 30 days. Guess what: That team is now performing those approvals in nine days. That leadership attention, that commitment to helping people work faster, the culture-change aspect of creating a race to the top within the bureaucracy where you get everybody to try to find ways to carve a couple days, a couple seconds off the process — that is a really important part of his innovation. That went hand-in-glove with a really strategic upgrade of the way that cities talk to developers through a digital platform. That means developers don’t have to submit the same piece of paper 10 times to different agencies, that you don’t have to go one agency after the next but that multiple agencies can be doing a simultaneous review. The digital piece complemented the leadership piece. What we pulled out of that experience is that you’ve got to do both.
Many jurisdictions have changed either a law or a policy to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units or additional homes on a lot. What is it about Austin that makes their work a model?
Policy change is a starting point, not an end destination. That’s the lesson that so many cities that have permissioned ADUs have learned the hard way. They’ve passed the policies that have legalized ADUs, but uptake has been minimal at best. Austin has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach. They have spent time talking with developers and single-family homeowners, understanding all the different reasons that people can say “No” to gentle densification, and have strategically removed each and every barrier. The lesson that other cities will learn from Austin is not that you will have to do every step that Austin did, but that you have to have your ear to the ground. You have to understand where developers and single-family homeowners are struggling, and you have to be systematic in removing the barriers that prevent people from doing the right thing.
The solution you’re elevating in Atlanta is less of a policy and more of an organizational, administrative effort. What happened there and how has it benefited housing production?
I love the Atlanta solution because it reflects one of the core truths of the government innovation work that we do here at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is that the way you do government has a big impact on the results you produce. We tend to organize the way we approach most issues at the local government level in a vertical way. Funding flows vertically. Incentive structures are organized vertically. Accountability is vertical. But housing — particularly housing but so many other issues — is a horizontal issue. It cuts across multiple agencies at the same time, all the time. If you’re just organizing vertically, you’re missing so many opportunities to streamline approvals, to buy in critical stakeholders, to recognize that lots of different people hold a part of the success and that you have to organize them all in order to unlock it.
Mayor
Andre Dickensorganized a horizontal strike force that was focused on identifying opportunities to unlock supply and seizing them quickly. That meant that it wasn’t just his housing chief responsible for carrying everything on his or her shoulders, but that lots of different departments — the public transit agency, the parks department, school districts — all of them are implicated in new housing development. They all have to give permission. They all have to share resources to allow new supply to come to fruition. Organizing everyone at the same table to streamline coordination and to speed cross-agency action had a very powerful effect on increasing supply in the city of Atlanta.
How do you know which cities are primed to try to replicate one of these solutions?
As a starting point, we looked at cities that had already made a commitment to zoning reform — softening the ground for supply. That was a precondition for their consideration. From there we spoke with the mayors and their teams and understood where they were, their level of ambition, where they saw the greatest opportunities. The thing about successful idea replication is that, first, you have to make sure that the problem you’re trying to solve is similar to the problem that the original cities were tackling. You then have to recognize that it’s never a carbon copy. It’s always going to require adaptation to local context. That takes time, attention, energy, political capital from the mayor and from city leadership. We tested for that.
What is the money that you’re going to give these cities actually going to allow them to do?
Money is only part of the investment. One of the things we’ve learned is there’s really important up-front work to do, when you’re adapting a solution, to do some implementation planning and thinking. So we’ll work with all these cities to begin thinking about how they will adapt a solution to the local context. That will be a very supportive process. We’ll be doing learning tours where we’ll take these mayors’ teams to the original cities so they can interview the original implementers and find out about all the hard knots and lessons learned along the way so they get a better sense of what it actually takes to do it. We’ll then help them take that data and information back and build it into their implementation plan.
From there we’ll make some grants, and the grants will do different things according to the three types of ideas. For example, if you’re a city that’s adapting the new San Diego idea, you can get some support around procuring a digital technology vendor. If you’re a city adapting the Austin strategy, you could hire an architectural firm to help design six bespoke ADU models that are preapproved by your local buildings department. If you’re implementing the Atlanta solution, you might hire a consulting firm to help you get a better understanding of available, publicly owned land that is ripe for development. The funding is flexible and may be used flexibly to support the mayors and the cities where they need it most.
To what extent are these solutions that grew out of a specific governing culture that can’t be easily replicated?
We saw nothing in our assessment of any of these three cities or the work they did that was so specific to time and place that those very important lessons and frameworks couldn’t be applied to other cities, either a regulatory structure or an available asset or something like that. We looked for that, but we didn’t find it.
You have a first cohort of cities that will be adopting some of these solutions. There are going to be more down the line. What is the process like for cities that are interested?
Cities since the announcement are finding their way to the Bloomberg Idea Exchange. We expect we’ll hear from lots of cities. One of the first questions we’ll be asking them is whether they’ve done some of the hard political work around zoning reform that is a precondition for future admittance to this particular program. In that way we hope to send a message that taking those important local political steps is really important for America and for its cities. We’re using this as another incentive structure to do the right thing. By the way, this is where we really line up with the newly passed
ROAD to Housing Act, [which makes a host of changes to federal housing policy, including tying some funding to local zoning reform work]. The innovation fund is also available only to cities that have done some of that zoning reform preparatory work. We’re all trying to send a message that you have to do that ground softening if you’re serious about unlocking supply. Otherwise it’s just rhetoric.