Across the United States, the gap between housing needs and housing production remains a major challenge, especially for low-income households, people with disabilities, and those emerging from homelessness. While public policy conversations often focus on what should be built, the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing is increasingly focused on projects that not only deliver much-needed housing in underserved areas, but are also transformative and instructive in how they were accomplished both quickly and feasibly.
Five new case studies that meet the criteria have been selected as the Terwilliger Center’s 2025 award winners: Market Street Village in San Diego, Sendero Verde in New York City, The Aster in Salt Lake City, The Kelsey Ayer Station in San José, and The Wilder in Nashville. Each of them offers an important, in-depth look at the financing structures, development strategies, community partnerships, and public policies that make such ambitious projects viable.
In addition, these most recent winners are now accompanied by a new series of policy profiles, which highlight the public-sector tools that made each project possible. Pairing these successful residential developments along with detailed policy analyses offers a powerful road map for an industry struggling to navigate today’s complex housing landscape.
Full case studies are available at: https://americas.uli.org/research/impact-lab/terwilliger-center-for-housing/research-publications/case-studies/
Speed, scale, and systems: Market Street Village, San Diego
Market Street Village demonstrates how housing preservation—rather than new construction—can be a powerful affordability strategy when paired with innovative financing and coordinated systems. The 229-unit Class A building was acquired and repurposed to serve veterans and workforce households, with roughly half of the units reserved for people exiting homelessness.
Rather than treating housing as a standalone asset, the development team intentionally integrated the property into San Diego’s coordinated entry system, connecting vacancies directly to the region’s list of people experiencing homelessness.
“We saw an opportunity to acquire a high-quality building with lower-cost capital,” said David Foster, president of BDP Impact Real Estate. “The [Community Solutions] Large Cities fund is designed to move at market speed—looking like a private equity buyer. Sellers won’t wait for multiple public approvals or complex [low-income housing tax credit] structures.”
For Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, the project embodies a wider philosophy: “Market Street Village is a concrete example of a broader vision, intentionally linking the housing we create or acquire to the goal that everyone’s basic housing needs are met.”
The project’s policy profile highlights how California’s property tax exemption, coordinated entry system, and adaptive reuse legislation helped enable this fast-moving acquisition model.
Climate, community, and complexity: Sendero Verde, New York City
Completed in 2024, Sendero Verde delivered 709 affordable apartments in East Harlem and is one of the largest certified affordable Passive House developments in the world. But the project is more than housing: it includes a K-5 charter school, community and cultural space, neighborhood retail, and three community gardens.
“Passive House made the objective clear and performance-based—less ‘sell the green story,’ more ‘design to the standard,’” said Jessica Yoon, managing director at L+M Development Partners. “It focused us on technical pathways that were cost-appropriate for affordable housing.”
Sendero Verde’s financing stack reflects the complexity of building at this scale: tax-exempt bonds, low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC), city and state subsidies, brownfield credits, and support from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. All were needed to close the funding gap.
The project’s policy profile demonstrates how New York City’s SustaiNYC RFP used public land disposition to push the market toward both deep affordability and climate-forward design.
According to Sabrina Barker, senior director of development at Jonathan Rose Companies, “The city chose to lead with affordable housing where it had the greatest influence, pushing the market on high-performance standards and pulling others along.”
Public realm as housing strategy: The Aster, Salt Lake City
The Aster transformed a long-blighted downtown site into a mixed-income, mixed-use community with 190 homes, retail, and a restored historic structure.
“We like to do projects that transform a neighborhood,” said Karly Brinla, senior vice president of development at Brinshore Development. “This was exactly that: a transformative inner-city project that felt very in line with our mission.”
Rather than treating affordability as an isolated program, The Aster integrates market-rate and income-restricted units across the site. Architecturally, the project reimagines a zoning requirement—a mid-block pedestrian paseo—as a central civic space.
“We designed the paseo not just as a requirement but as an active public realm,” said Keith McCloskey, principal at KTGY Architecture + Planning. “An outdoor corridor lined with retail and community uses invites people into the project and makes downtown feel more connected.”
The policy profile for The Aster details how site control, municipal gap financing, and LIHTC “twinning” allowed the project to proceed.
Redefining accessibility: The Kelsey Ayer Station, San José
The Kelsey Ayer Station is a six-story, transit-oriented development with 115 affordable homes, 25 percent of which are reserved for people with disabilities. It is the first project to fully implement The Kelsey’s inclusive design standards, created to equip professionals with frameworks for the creation of disability-forward housing.
Design is only half the story. “Inclusive housing isn’t just about how you build—it’s about how you operate,” said Micaela Connery, co-founder of The Kelsey. “The inclusion concierge ensures that the commitment continues long after opening.”
Public policy played a pivotal role. “SB35 was essential,” she said. “Traditional entitlements would have meant delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars in added costs. With SB35, we had approvals in a week.”
The project’s policy profile illustrates how streamlined approvals, transit-oriented development funding, long-term affordability covenants, and HUD’s Section 811 program aligned to make disability-forward housing feasible in one of the nation’s most expensive markets.
Small, fast, and replicable: The Wilder, Nashville
The Wilder is a former 1970s motel converted into 97 studio apartments, and a real-world study in speed, cost efficiency, and local innovation that can be replicated elsewhere.
“With adaptive reuse, the benefits end up being your constraints,” said Clay Adkisson, partner at OpenWorks. “We had to utilize the structure and plumbing where it currently exists, but we insisted on creating something that felt like Class A housing.”
The project was delivered in under two years and capitalized through a mix of local equity, Community Development Lending Institution (CDFI) loans, and Nashville’s new Mixed-Income Housing PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) program.
“Had we not received the PILOT, we would not have been able to develop a project at such a high standard,” Adkisson said.
The policy profile illustrates how local tools and partnerships can fill critical gaps in housing markets.
Building the conditions for housing that work
The case studies for these award-worthy projects offer more than a spotlight on innovation in residential development—they demonstrate how policy tools made them possible despite the stubbornly complex challenges and obstacles. The Terwilliger Center’s 2025 award winners do not share a single typology or financing mechanism for their successes, but rather highlight a core principle: strategic alignment of public policy, design creativity, developer savvy, and capital investment can bring about transformative results—and help alleviate the acute shortage of affordable housing, especially for society’s most vulnerable.
