To solve its housing affordability crisis, Boston has turned to residents

The 2016 exemption to Ventura County's strict farmland protection laws has enabled the development of nearly 700 affordable housing units for farmworkers. These rent-controlled apartments on former agricultural land provide stable housing regardless of immigration status.

A city-sanctioned program allows people to camp on a corner in Chattanooga, despite it being illegal statewide. The safety and stability allow residents to focus on improving their economic situations in order to find stable housing.

An initiative in St. Petersburg has reduced the number of vacant houses while increasing access to affordable housing. The city takes ownership of vacant lots and abandoned homes, then sells the properties to affordable housing developers or auctions them off. The initiative helps make land cheap enough to build affordable housing.

As second-home owners increase property values and decrease the supply of residences in Gunnison County, its year-round community faces a dwindling affordable housing stock. Nearby, a popular tourist town of Breckenridge in neighboring Summit County has been able to deliver a measurable increase in affordable homes. The Gunnison County Housing Authority is following Summit's goal-oriented, community-driven solution, and turning to residents to form a community plan and vision.

In the 1960s, Uruguay created a cooperative housing policy designed to help ease housing shortages especially among lower- and middle-class residents, with cooperative projects bolstered by state loans and technical support. The country now counts over 70,000 co-op-owned homes, making up roughly 5 percent of the housing stock.

To address affordable housing gaps, places such as Montgomery County, Maryland are experimenting with a strategy called social housing, which brings public housing to “amenity-rich” buildings that also house higher income residents. The county’s first project allocated 90 units out of 268 for residents making up to $60,000 in a building with amenities like a yoga studio and pool, while in Vienna, a similar approach to social housing has ensured that roughly half of the city’s residents live in housing owned by the city or managed by a mission-driven organization.

In 2024, New Jersey passed a new law that formalized longstanding requirements that municipalities periodically submit affordable housing plans to the state. The law also created a new mediation program for municipalities that want to dispute the state’s calculation of its affordable housing requirements, and the new system has helped cut down on lawsuits that slow down the process of getting new housing approved.

To help increase housing stock, New Rochelle, NY streamlined the development approval process and made it easier to approve many housing units at once, allowing the city to add roughly 4,500 new housing units over the last decade. However, local residents worry about being priced out of the area as people move from Manhattan in search of more affordable housing.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s disaster recovery program provides federal funding to build affordable apartments in areas that have lost significant housing stock to disasters such as hurricanes. But due to the required congressional approval process and complex regulations, projects funded by the program often take so long to complete that people affected by the disaster are not able to benefit from the housing. In North Carolina, one such development opened to tenants more than five years after Hurricane Florence struck the area.

Mandatory inclusionary zoning policies have increased affordable housing stock in many cities across the U.S. In most cases, the policies require developers build 5-10% of new units with rents attainable for low- to median-income people, or pay a fee, which is dedicated to other affordable housing projects. In Redmond, Washington, such policy has resulted in a 42% growth of housing stock since 2010.