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Over the course of 11 weeks, elected officials, planners, and local community-based organizations from six counties worked in partnership with Smart Growth America and the National Association of Counties (NACo) during our first Counties for Housing Solutions (C4HS) program. Through the program, participants from Guilford County, North Carolina; Harris County, Texas; Hidalgo County, Texas; Jackson County, Missouri; Salt Lake County, Utah; and Shelby County, Tennessee focused on leveraging underutilized and/or vacant county-owned land to develop affordable housing for their constituents.

Housing affordability is an issue that is top of mind for most Americans. In recent months, solutions that can lower housing costs and increase the supply of permanently affordable housing stock have received bipartisan support. As local governments look to drive economic mobility in their communities, housing production offers a means to make progress for residents and local fiscal objectives. Housing construction has a positive ripple effect in communities—it creates new employment opportunities, provides new tax revenue for local governments, and increases consumer spending in local businesses.

With such positive impacts, it makes sense for local governments to incentivize new housing development and/or put on the developer hat themselves. This fall, six counties decided to not just talk about the need for more affordable housing but to do something about it.

“The Cheapest land is the land that you already own!” -C4HS Fall 2024 Cohort

The C4HS program featured a blend of educational sessions, one-on-one office hours, and collaborative peer learning opportunities. To walk teams through the housing development process, the program touched upon the following topics:

• Finding your land: How to select the perfect site for housing development.
• Development barriers: Determining if zoning is preventing your community from developing housing and how to eliminate zoning barriers.
• Building support: Understanding the importance of creating a community engagement strategy to overcome potential opposition to sorely needed housing for all.
• Funding and resources: How can counties pay for affordable housing projects without mortgaging the future of their community?
• Finding the right partners: How to find and select the right developer for the right housing project on county-owned land.
• Measuring results: How to evaluate your project results to ensure success.
• Make a lasting impact: How to scale and leverage a development project to gain a return on investment.

The cohort took away many pieces of hard-won knowledge from seasoned affordable housing professionals, which would be too long to list in their entirety. As a snapshot, here were the top five key takeaways from our conversations over the course of the C4HS program:

1. Housing projects should not isolate low-income households, which can create the conditions for food and service deserts. Mixed-income housing projects, when situated in well-connected areas, can increase community cohesion and the financial viability of development.
2. Affordable housing development is a business of tradeoffs. Projects need to be financially viable to sustain housing development and long-term maintenance of properties.
3. Being a good partner to local developers includes establishing open communication (notably to gauge project feasibility), accelerating review and permitting processes, and balancing desired project amenities with market feasibility.
4. 80% of registered voters would like local governments to take action on the housing supply shortage. The majority of the public supports new housing projects, even if the loudest voices at municipal meetings seem to indicate otherwise.
5. Manufactured housing and volumetric modular construction offer the highest opportunities to improve home affordability by reducing construction costs.

Next Steps: New Housing!

The cohort has begun work on the ambitious task of taking their learnings from C4HS to begin advancing affordable housing projects locally. While still in the early stages, here is a sneak peek at the projects they are pursuing:

• Guilford County: Develop a former school site into a residential multifamily and mixed-use commercial space (estimated 100-120 housing units)
• Harris County: Redevelop a stadium into an Entertainment District Bolstered with 3,000 housing units (1,200 affordable units)
• Hidalgo County: Create a community of 25 duplexes on public open space, co-locating 50 families near a local school and commercial retail corridor (50 housing units)
• Jackson County: Develop a large site located near a sports stadium into mixed-income, mixed-use housing, with dedicated units for seniors.
• Salt Lake County: Create a missing middle housing community on a site co-located near grocery stores, commercial spaces, and a local school (8-45 units depending on the housing typology selected)
• Shelby County: Utilize scattered land bank parcels to develop missing middle housing across a selected neighborhood to spur further community investment and decrease neighborhood vacancy rates (estimated 25+ units)

These projects have the potential to result in more than 3,000 housing units across the country over the next several years. Smart Growth America is excited to see how these projects continue to progress. Keep an eye out for future blog posts reporting on the C4HS cohorts’ built results!

With our first cohort complete, we look forward to launching our second round later in 2025. Applications will soon go live, so stay tuned!

Funded by the Gates Foundation, Smart Growth America and the National Association of Counties will steward three cohorts of counties in developing affordable housing on county owned land by the end of 2025 Each group will work over the course of 3-4 months with Smart Growth America and NACo to work on a targeted housing supply issue such as eliminating zoning barriers to affordable housing, funding affordable housing, and counties serving as developers. C4HS was launched in order to help counties implement a variety of housing supply solutions outlined in NACo’s 2023 House Task Force report. This work is part of a larger NACo program of work, the Counties for Economic Mobility Initiative, which works to advance equitable economic mobility solutions to help individuals and families move out of poverty.