Policy Development and Research

“Making it Happen” is a series of issue briefs that explore recent successes in scaling affordable housing innovations by addressing regulatory and financing barriers to these innovations.

This issue brief, the second in a series, focuses on opportunities to scale affordable housing innovations. Enterprise highlights regulatory reforms that would make it easier to leverage off-site construction and opportunities to tailor financing products to its unique needs.

Explore the potential positive outcomes of allowing low-density multifamily (LDMF) development in areas previously reserved for single-family development, as well as prominent regulatory and financing challenges to creating LDMF housing.

This white paper examines the opportunities and challenges of converting strip malls to affordable housing and highlights two successful examples from New York and California.

“Making it Happen” is a series of issue briefs that explore recent successes in scaling affordable housing innovations by addressing regulatory and financing barriers to these innovations. The first in the series, this issue brief lays out recent progress in bringing Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) development to scale.

This white paper identifies opportunities and barriers to bringing accessory dwelling unit (ADU) development to scale to boost affordability and diversity in housing options, especially in predominantly single-family zoned neighborhoods. Our research examines both regulatory and financial barriers to increasing “gentle density” and offers recommendations for addressing these problems.

This white paper explores where the use of off-site construction techniques can boost the creation of subsidized housing and create cost savings for market-rate developers, which can help expand the supply of homes and ultimately enable homeowners and tenants to benefit from these benefits by lowering their housing costs, and what kinds of changes to the regulatory and financing systems could scale the use of off-site construction.

The Gentrification Comparison Tool maps neighborhoods in 93 U.S. cities over four decades by their gentrification status under three different definitions.

Building on previous Enterprise research, this case study addresses six challenges associated with the publicly owned parcel development process in Washington State’s Puget Sound region. It provides recommendations aimed at helping the region’s public agencies expand their efforts to coordinate and ensure effective policies and adequate resources are in place to facilitate more equitable development on publicly owned parcels

Small and medium multifamily buildings are the most affordable segment of the housing stock and play a crucial role in providing reasonably priced homes to thousands of families. We must preserve and expand the affordable stock to meet current needs even as we encourage the market to produce more housing which, with time, will become affordable.