Affordable Housing
NZI on TAP: Philadelphia & Peer Cities Brainstorm Best Practices for Retrofitting Affordable Housing
ULI Philadelphia and the ULI Net Zero Imperative, in partnership with the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Housing and Community Development and the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, hosted a two-day technical assistance workshop in May 2025, focused on retrofitting existing affordable housing to net zero.
U.S. House and Senate housing bills now moving toward reconciliation would reshape federal policies that affect housing supply, finance, zoning incentives, and development feasibility across markets.
As 2025 draws to a close, the year’s most-read articles in Urban Land magazine reflect a pivotal moment in urban development. Themes reflected this year include resilience against climate-driven disasters, ambitious waterfront and downtown revitalizations, stabilizing construction economics, entertainment-anchored urban renewal, and innovative housing strategies. These stories also capture the industry’s focus on adaptive, inclusive, and forward-thinking land use.
Last week, during ULI Washington’s Fourth Annual Future Forum, held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., a panel titled “Housing from All Angles” brought together three experts to examine the intersection of homelessness, development, and housing finance.
The ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing has announced two winners for this year’s Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award and three winners for the Center’s Award for Innovation in Attainable Housing. “ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing is excited to present the 2025 winners of the Kemp and Innovation awards,” said Aimee Witteman, Chief Impact Officer at ULI. “Each winner is showing the industry how to create more inclusive and affordable communities through housing production.”
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Yesterday, more than 400 commercial real estate professionals and elected officials gathered at the National Building Museum for the third annual Future Forum, a regional conference for public and private-sector leaders.
Roughly 10,000 people live on the streets or in temporary shelters in San José, California. This estimate, based on 2023 point-in-time calculations, sparked ULI members in the San Francisco Bay area to leverage ULI’s Homeless to Housed (H2H) grant initiative to help uncover potential housing solutions for their bayside neighbor.
“ULI members in San Antonio understand the precariousness of their city’s housing crisis,” says Javier Paredes, principal at StudioMassivo and ULI San Antonio member leader. “They [also] recognize the power of aligning housing with transit to create greater housing stability.” In response to San Antonio’s housing crisis, ULI San Antonio members and staff applied to participate in a local technical assistance grant program from ULI’s Homeless to Housed (H2H) initiative.
In Lafayette, Louisiana, homelessness and the lack of affordable housing are creating strain, prompting NIMBYism among community members and leaving civic leaders uncertain of a clear path forward. Understanding this challenge and the tension it can create throughout a city, ULI members gathered community members and leaders to dig into the difficult challenge of housing the city’s unhoused and most vulnerable residents. Supported by the ULI Homeless to Housed (H2H) grant initiative, Catholic Charities of Acadiana in Lafayette and ULI Louisiana gathered more than 300 residents for a series of community workshops to better understand the challenge and to outline pathways toward more deeply affordable housing and services for people most in need.
Estimates suggest that, on any given night, almost 800 individuals are unsheltered, and more than 3,700 are living in emergency or transitional housing in Philadelphia. Homelessness can often be connected to difficulties in finding affordable housing.
With insights and research from a ULI Technical Advisory Panel and ULI’s Terwilliger Center, the Austin Housing Conservancy fund, a revolutionary approach to preserving workforce housing, was born. Now known as the Texas Housing Conservancy, the fund became the nation’s first to combine a nonprofit investment manager, Affordable Central Texas, with an open-end private equity fund.
As we approach Election Day on November 5, issues such as the shortage of affordable housing and climate change are top of mind for many voters. When it comes to the cost of living, an unprecedented increase in home prices and surging rent are affecting both renters and homeowners. Adaptive reuse, particularly in urban areas, must be considered as a solution to mitigate these pressing matters, especially in an older city such as St. Louis, Missouri, which was founded in 1764.
A $3.6 billion commitment to create or preserve 35,000-plus affordable homes
President Biden’s administration aims to speed up historic building reviews.
The city of Baltimore has approximately 13,000 abandoned houses and 20,000 vacant lots that create health, safety, and financial hazards for nearby properties. Although it might seem simple to fix and flip these homes, the math doesn’t easily compute.
In an era when the demand for attainable housing continues to outpace supply, sustainable workforce housing is a necessary and prudent investment decision based on three key market trends. Primarily, the demand for attainable housing is growing. Workforce rental housing is increasingly sought after, particularly given dwindling affordability and growing barriers to home ownership. Last but not least, generational demand contributes to the rise of sustainable multifamily housing.
Rethinking the “slum": A look into the traditional building practices and community bonds that make India’s informal settlements more than just a lack of formal tenure.
The 2024 Terwilliger Center Home Attainability Index (HAI) features a full set of interactive data visualization tools that can help ULI members unpack housing challenges nationwide and specifically for their locale.
AUSTIN—Despite rumblings to the contrary, the American dream of homeownership is not a fading relic from the nation’s Post World War II era. In fact, homeownership remains a key lever to elevate families from generational poverty to the middle class, according to two of the nation’s top leaders in the housing industry.
AUSTIN – The nation’s housing market may show a slight uptick this year, but for millions of Americans spanning the great gulf of home affordability will remain impossible, according to opening day speakers at the 2024 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference, which drew more than 500 attendees.
Ethnic and cultural diversity, combined with a reputation as a welcoming place for immigrants, has long been a strength of the Greater Toronto Area—and it has also influenced the city’s development, panelists cautioned at ULI’s 2023 Spring Meeting.
ULI’s fourth annual Resilience Summit in Toronto featured a panel of affordable housing and climate crisis experts offering solutions in the face of sobering odds.
In late January, ULI Indiana convened a panel of local real estate experts to unpack Indiana real estate trends for 2023.
Using technology that is relatively new to North America, Alquist is constructing a two-story home in a neighborhood of Houston using a massive 3D printer.
A long-term trend of housing underproduction exacerbated by rising inflation and economic uncertainty threatens home attainability for millions of people across the United States, according to the 2022 Home Attainability Index, a comprehensive new study from the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing.
Building on the 2020 pilot and 2021 update focused on the COVID-19 pandemic’s implications for housing, the 2022 edition of the index explores the attainability implications of shifts in housing demand and regional competitiveness due to demographic changes, pandemic-influenced employer and employee location decisions, and the high cost of both building and finding homes in the largest and most economically vibrant regions.
Amazon has announced plans to provide more than $124.4 million to build 1,060 affordable homes near four public transit sites while working in partnership with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority and Sound Transit to complete the developments. This is part of Amazon’s $300 million transit commitment from 2021 to create 3,000 new affordable homes in collaboration with the transit agencies in each region.
At the 2022 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference, a session looked at the high cost of the gap between U.S. population and job growth and the creation of housing where people want to live.
At ULI’s Restorative Development: Infrastructure and Land Use Exchange forum in February, representatives of ReConnect Rondo shared their efforts to create a renewed neighborhood over Interstate 94 in Minnesota.
Longtime ULI Trustee Jonathan F.P. Rose has been selected as the 2021 recipient of the ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. Rose recently spoke with Urban Land about his holistic approach to building communities of opportunity.
