10 Things Planners Can Do to Support Housing Choice and Affordability

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1. Demonstrate how the entire community will benefit from affordable housing.

2. Conduct a housing needs assessment and use the results to craft a housing plan that responds to your community’s unique needs.

3. Help preserve existing housing stock. Encourage your community to maintain affordable housing units and replace units lost to redevelopment.

4. Implement development practices, plans, and regulations that result in innovative and diverse housing choices such as cluster housing, single room occupancy developments, mixed-income housing and accessory dwelling units.

5. Encourage universal design by enforcing federal and state accessibility requirements and adopting visitability codes for all single and multi-family residential construction.

6. Tell your elected leaders that you support the establishment of a National Housing Trust Fund to produce, rehabilitate, and preserve housing units.

7. Incorporate energy efficiency goals and green building standards in guidelines that impact the design and construction all residential development, including affordable housing.

8. Support the reauthorization of federal housing resources such as Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Housing Choice Vouchers, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Programs.

9. Share examples of affordable housing projects that are high-quality, attractive, and maintain community character.

10. Learn more about the impact of housing on schools, employment, and transportation in order to craft comprehensive policies the respond to interconnectedness of planning.

Ready to get to work?  Explore the following resources on APA's website:

Affordable Housing Reader
A collection of more than 100 housing articles from Planning, Zoning Practice, PAS Memo, and other APA publications.

Housing Choice
With support from the Fannie Mae Foundation, APA conducted a series of scoping sessions in 2004 designed to get in tune with real world affordable housing problems and opportunities throughout the country. Read summaries of the sessions, an analysis of the themes raised, and a set of promising affordable housing strategies created by APA.

APA's Planning Advisory Service
PAS is your on-call team of specialists and researchers. PAS offers a number of great resources on housing including a recently updated Essential PAS Info Packet on inclusionary housing.

Housing and Community Development Division
The Housing and Community Development Division represents close to 450 members who work in many different areas of housing and community development. The overriding goal of the Division is to advocate for more accessible and equitable communities in our urban and rural areas.