Across North America, cities are confronting a housing crisis that demands urgent, innovative responses. In Toronto, the launch of the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) in April 2020 marked a pivotal moment—an accelerated effort at the height of the pandemic to deliver safe, stable housing. Since then, unprecedented investments have been made in communities across Ontario to address housing insecurity, reshaping the province’s residential landscape.

Although video conferencing and other technological innovation has made it possible for economic activities to be dispersed, differences in growth rates, jobs, and incomes have increased, in recent decades, as regions in the Northwest and Midwest have lost population and regions in the South and West have experienced population, employment, and income growth. The negative effects of housing price increases in growing regions serve as a constraint to domestic migration and economic opportunities, especially for lower-skilled workers. In the long run, unaffordable housing prices contribute to unequal regional development and worsening income disparities. Job-rich regions need to encourage housing production.

Even as national policy support becomes less predictable, many states and localities are hard at work developing pragmatic, scalable housing solutions.

In 2015, Austin, Texas’ mayor at the time, Steve Adler, brought together business leaders, real estate professionals, and housing experts to take on the crisis in affordable rental housing and the risks it posed to the city’s workforce stability and economic sustainability. With insights and research from a ULI Technical Advisory Panel and ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, the Austin Housing Conservancy fund was born, offering a revolutionary approach to preserving workforce housing. 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.

The ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing has announced two finalists for this year’s Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award and eight finalists for the Terwilliger Center Award for Innovation in Attainable Housing.

Setting the tone for this year’s ULI Asia Pacific Summit, moderator Lola Woetzel, senior partner emerita at McKinsey & Company, presented a panel of industry leaders with the perennial question: “How does it feel to live here?” The discussion brought into sharp focus the complex realities shaping housing across the region.

Zed Smith is the chief operating officer for The Cordish Companies. In that capacity—now for almost a decade—Smith oversees all aspects of the company’s operating properties portfolio, which includes numerous high-profile entertainment, mixed-use, and sports-anchored developments located in urban communities nationwide. Many of those developments have been transformative, thanks to their economic and cultural impact.

10 inventive designs put housing within reach of low- and moderate-income individuals and families

A panel of sustainability experts recently gathered at the 2025 ULI Resilience Summit in Denver to discuss how the insurability of affordable housing can be greatly enhanced by using resilient construction.

As it contends with the same post-pandemic challenges that confront other urban cores nationwide, downtown Denver is leveraging public/private partnerships to bring back vitality. At the ULI 2025 Spring Meeting in Denver, Colorado, five leaders involved with the city’s revitalization shared recent successes and plans for Denver’s future.