Architects warn that solving affordable housing goes beyond design and finance and requires a collaborative approach to policy change.
The architects’ concerns come as this month marked World Architecture Day, created by the International Union of Architects (UIA) and observed on the first Monday of every October. This year's theme was “Housing is a Human Right. Build It.” The theme runs parallel to the United Nations World Habitat Day 2026 theme, “Adequate Housing for All.”
The UIA warns that “access to adequate housing must be recognized as a fundamental right” and “architecture contributes to making this right a reality.”
Newsweek spoke with several architects who highlighted the key challenges and measures needed to combat the affordable housing crisis worldwide.
Rethinking What We Already Have
Architect Daniel Baumann, principal and design director at Henning Larsen, told Newsweek that “the greatest opportunity is already standing,” noting that converting and adapting underused buildings is “the fastest, most affordable and most sustainable way to create housing.”
Building new communities from scratch is costly, drains energy and resources, and is often impractical, he said, citing permit issues and the distances created between where people work and study. However, Baumann said vacant buildings and underused land sit within existing neighborhoods, with transit, schools, and services already in place.
The UIA also agreed, noting that addressing the housing crisis requires “practical, sustainable and context-responsive approaches,” including developing inclusive housing models and reusing existing building stock.
Zoning Reform
Architect Scott Specht, founding partner at Specht Novak, told Newsweek that the change he’d like to see that carries the most potential is zoning reform, referring to “what cities, and the people who vote in them, are willing to let get built.” He explained: “You can invent the cheapest wall system in the world and it won't make a dent in affordability if the zoning code says you can only put one house on a quarter-acre lot.”
Specht said Austin, Texas, serves as “pretty good evidence that this works.” When the city council adopted the HOME reforms a few years ago, which allowed owners to build up to three units on a single-family lot and shrink lots to 1,800 square feet, many residents opposed them. However, the reform passed despite the pushback, and Austin later became the largest city in the country to eliminate parking requirements.
“Those changes will reshape our neighborhoods more than any 3D printer, and they push architects toward houses that are smaller and closer together but still comfortable to live in,” Specht said.
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Specht said that the move led the city to build apartments “faster than anyone could move into them,” and rent prices dropped more than in any other city in the country, with home prices down about a fifth from their 2022 peak.
He noted: “Interest rates and slower migration played a part, but the main reason is simply that there are a lot more places to live here than there were five years ago.”
The attitude seems to be shifting in places you'd never expect, he said, pointing to San Francisco. Specht said the city “pretty much perfected the art of blocking new housing,” but last December approved a rezoning plan that opens up much of the city's west and north sides to taller apartment buildings.
While some local opposition to new housing construction hasn't gone away, “I think more people are noticing that their own kids can't afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in, and that has changed a lot of minds,” Specht said.
Architect Max Berger, an associate at Fogarty Finger Architecture and the principal at MSB Architecture, notes that design alone cannot resolve a systemic affordability crisis. He told Newsweek that “meaningful progress requires policies that enable more housing to be built and ensure that affordable housing remains accessible to the people who need it.”
Architect Carmine Cafiero, managing principal at Purple Cherry Architecture & Design, agreed that a greater emphasis on approaching zoning reform as a collaborative design problem rather than something developed in isolation is needed.
Cafiero told Newsweek that bringing government officials, zoning and planning staff, architects, developers and community members together in working sessions can produce zoning ordinances that better reflect how people actually need to live today.
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In February 2025, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner announced that the federal government would be ending the Biden-era 2021 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, aiming to cut “costly red tape imposed on localities and returning decision-making power to local and state governments.”
HUD described the AFFH rule as effectively a “zoning tax,” saying in June 2025 that it “fueled an increase in the cost and a decrease in the supply of affordable housing due to restrictions on local land.”
HUD has previously introduced other measures to help lower housing costs and improve affordability.
In May, the department announced updates to environmental review requirements for multifamily housing, “removing outdated provisions that have increased costs and complexity for lenders and developers.”
“This is about fixing policies that have made housing expensive and difficult to build,” Turner said at the time. “We are cutting outdated requirements, reducing costs and delays, and putting [Federal Housing Administration] financing back to work to support housing production and improve home affordability for American families.”
New Ways to Both Design and Build Housing
Ben Wan, Principal at RODE Architects in Boston, told Newsweek that the contractors offering the most value to their projects are those serious about exploring new ways to build and seeking efficiencies that challenge traditional building methods.
Wan explained: “Lean construction that incorporates more sustainable materials like mass timber flooring can be faster, more sustainable, and just as durable as concrete and steel. Contractors are exploring means of pre-fabrication and panelization that offer better quality control and speed of construction.”
Cafiero notes that “density does not have to mean sacrificing quality of life. It requires more thoughtful planning and a willingness to rethink the traditional separation of housing types.”
Wan says mass timber buildings bring “a warmth and character of natural material that is universally appealing,” and is excited by the advancement of mass-timber construction materials and technologies, which allows for “building greater densities, with robust construction.”
He said that while costs are higher today, as with any new technology, “we are hopeful that experimentation, propagation, and more competition will work to bring costs down and expand the application of this construction type.”
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Cafiero said that “housing affordability cannot be considered independently from transportation, infrastructure and community planning,” and believes that by 2050, “we will be designing homes around technologies and patterns of movement that are difficult to imagine today.”
Residential architecture has historically been shaped by automobiles, garages, driveways, streets, parking requirements and the relationship between a house and the road, but the next generation of technology could fundamentally change that relationship, he said.
“That makes the role of the architect particularly interesting. We are no longer simply designing a building for the way people live today. We are designing a framework that needs to remain useful as the way people live changes," he said.
Harnessing the Power of AI
Berger thinks that artificial intelligence-assisted design optimization has “significant potential to reduce waste and improve housing production efficiency.”
Cafiero says we are already seeing AI's positive impact on design, noting that larger-scale adoption of CNC fabrication, 3D printing and AI-assisted design and construction logistics is beginning to reduce material waste, improve precision and speed up parts of the process.
“By 2050, I expect those capabilities to be much more sophisticated," Cafiero said. "AI will increasingly help coordinate the enormous amount of information involved in designing and building a home, while robotic fabrication will allow components to be produced with greater precision and potentially at lower cost.”
He warned, however, that we need to be thoughtful about assuming that every technological advancement automatically produces a better or less expensive home. “The promised benefits have to be measured against actual outcomes, including quality, reliability, labor implications and unintended consequences. Construction automation will require that same discipline,” Cafiero said.
Berger agreed, noting that there needs to be distinction between making housing more profitable to build and making it affordable to live in.
“We can use AI to reduce the cost of building housing, but we cannot use AI to guarantee that housing becomes affordable," he said.
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Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sirena Bergman and Sam Wilson.