State legislators across 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have put forward almost 3,000 bills this session to address the housing crisis. But prices continue to crush Americans, with roughly 42 million households spending more than a third of their income on housing. And tariffs and deportations could make home building — and, therefore, home prices — even more expensive.
The root cause of the crisis is simple: We do not have enough housing to meet demand.
Some state and local leaders have already found creative ways to increase the housing supply. But to tackle this problem, we don’t just need to build more homes — we need to build them faster.
The urgency isn’t lost on all state and local officials. Several states passed legislation in 2024 to streamline the permitting process. And cities such as San Antonio and Minneapolis have implemented comprehensive housing plans that include zoning changes and other land-use reforms.
But bureaucratic processes and red tape are still stifling construction at a time when the country is 3.7 million housing units short. Many of these processes were designed with good intentions, such as protecting communities from gentrification and environmental harm, but they have led to long delays, increased costs and empowered opposition by local residents.
Too Long to Build
In New York City, proposals that must go through the land-use review process had a median wait time of 30 months for a permit. In Los Angeles, the median permit approval time was 31 months for multifamily developments that required a full environmental review; in Santa Monica, it was 77 months. Building projects can be bogged down or even halted by a single complaint. (This might change with rules relaxed following January’s wildfires, but only temporarily.)
It wasn’t always like this. As Marc J. Dunkelman argues in his new book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, populist backlash from government overreach in the mid-20th century led to an effort to return power to ordinary citizens. But giving veto power to too many people and groups has led to institutional gridlock, crippling our ability to get things done. By relying so heavily on procedure, we have taken decision-making power away from state and local governments and replaced it with a tangle of process requirements and the fear of lawsuits.
Policymakers may avoid accountability for any one unpopular outcome by pointing to the process, but at some point, they must be accountable for the cumulative result: generations facing sky-high rents, delayed homeownership and diminished wealth.
We should not sacrifice our values, but we cannot allow them to delay building when the need for more housing is so urgent and so great. Instead, we need to find better and faster ways to incorporate these values into building processes.
State and Local Approaches
For state and local leaders, that will mean understanding the trade-offs, establishing speed and cost preferences for development that meet our highest ideals and, sometimes, making hard choices on the front end between competing objectives. Plans that meet established criteria should be authorized to move quickly; only the most unusual developments posing novel questions need be subject to detailed reviews.
It is exciting to see some states and cities finding ways to remove unnecessary hurdles, like streamlining reviews and leaning on preapproved housing designs. Some jurisdictions are increasing “by-right” (also known as “as-of-right”) permitting, which approves permits without special review. This process can be faster and less cumbersome than discretionary permitting, where approvals are negotiated on a project-by-project basis after public hearings.
Other states and cities are revising their zoning laws to ramp up construction and create denser neighborhoods with cheaper housing options. Through these strategies, cities and states can privilege projects that get most things right, valuing progress and efficiency as much as they value other important concerns.
For example, Portland, Ore., has an initiative to speed up the city’s development of affordable, smaller homes and “middle housing,” which are medium-density, multifamily structures such as duplexes, cottage clusters and townhouses. The city updated its zoning rules in response to a 2019 state law requiring cities with over 25,000 residents to allow middle housing on residential lots previously zoned for single-family homes. In less than three years, Portland greenlit 1,400 permits for middle housing and accessory dwelling units, almost half of all new housing permits.
The initiative has also put more affordable housing units on the market by incentivizing smaller builds. Smaller houses mean lower sale prices, putting the possibility of homeownership within reach of more residents. Between 2023 and 2024, a new middle-housing unit in Portland cost roughly $250,000 to $300,000 less than a single-family, detached house. At the same time, more developers that are building in single-family zones are participating in the city’s affordable homeownership programs.
Though development has stalled in the parts of the city that are zoned for multifamily units, the middle-housing initiative has rapidly made new, affordable homes available to residents in areas that were only zoned for single-family housing.
The federal government should also play a role, but most housing decisions happen at the local level. That means state and local leaders hold the power to speed things up. Our next generation’s superheroes are the people who will hold tight to their values around environmental justice and equality, while creating more efficient systems for building affordable homes.
Sarah Rosen Wartell is the president of the Urban Institute.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
