Up Your Game

As housing costs rise, so do the innovations of construction

In an effort to combat the rising cost of housing, the Economic Innovation Group, a D.C.-based "bipartisan public policy organization" is researching innovative "vertical" methods.

The organization just launched a new research and policy initiative dedicated to housing supply and affordability. EIG (featured in a recent issue of EA's "Know Your Industry" department, says it has spent the past decade "advancing ideas to tackle the country’s most pressing economic issues." Its very first initiative, Opportunity Zones, found progress as one of the more significant housing supply policies enacted in decades. But while Opportunity Zones demonstrated that federal policy can meaningfully expand housing supply when incentives are designed correctly, "far more is needed to address the true scale of the national housing crisis," according to the group's President and CEO, John Lettieri, who recently detailed EIG's efforts in an email to EA.

"EIG will approach our housing work the same way we approach everything else: grounded in rigorous research, focused on solutions that scale, and committed to advancing big ideas that align with how markets work in the real world," Lettieri said, adding that "the key to housing affordability is much greater housing supply of all types, and that their work will be primarily centered on how federal policy can be a catalyst for reform.

To that end, EIG released a new paper today on how federal lawmakers can design Right to Build Zones (RBZs), a bold proposal to help municipalities unlock housing supply while preserving local control. Crucially, RBZs reflect EIG’s conviction that the best policy interventions are ones that better enable markets to solve societal problems without micromanaging outcomes.