Accelerating Housing Production: Bridging the Gap Between Pro-Housing State Legislation and Local Housing Supply

Across the country, state legislatures are passing ambitious packages of pro-housing legislation aiming to increase the housing supply and ease the housing crisis. The impact of these laws depends on whether more housing is actually built. Yet cities and towns are achieving varying results as they work to comply with legislation — often working in isolation and with limited resources.

What are the existing barriers to housing production at the local level, and what levers directly affect those barriers? What potential strategies and innovation opportunities exist for states to help local governments build more housing, faster?

The GPL explored these questions in interviews with dozens of government leaders, advocates, and researchers. Interviewees identified four key barriers to faster housing production:

1. Permitting: Slow, inefficient permitting and development approval systems
2. Zoning: Challenging zoning and land use reform processes.
3. Markets: Under-resourced and disengaged local development communities
4. Data: Lack of real-time measurement of housing production and evaluation of new programs and policies

Our interviews also surfaced insights into how leaders believe states can serve as the driving force to solve problems across these four barriers. Specifically, states can provide local housing leaders with:

1. Access to direct technical assistance
2. Scalable tools and peer-to-peer learning opportunities
3. Monitoring and accountability support
4. Feedback opportunities to inform future statewide policy priorities

Within states, peer cities and towns operate in the same regulatory environment, offering an opportunity for scalability and broad adoption of field-tested solutions. State governments have significant control over regulations, both through legislative reform and agency-level policy. Some states are already testing forms of active state engagement in local implementation, which may allow them to drive scaled uptake of impactful practices at the local level, rather than the existing, fragmented, ‘every-city-for-itself’ approach.

The findings captured in this report inform the GPL’s strategy in designing and executing a State Housing Production Accelerator, which focuses on producing innovative, scalable solutions to facilitate local housing production that can be spread across additional states and the country.

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