Solving the Housing Shortage Can Be a Force Multiplier
Date Posted: September 22, 2026
Posted In: Discussion,
From Urban Land: America needs a lot more housing. By one estimate, the United States must build at least 14 million homes over the next decade to meet demand. The consequences of decades of underproduction are increasingly visible in rising rents and home prices, declining access to homeownership, and workers struggling to live near the communities they serve.
There is also real momentum to address the problem. From July 2024 to July 2025, state and local governments passed 124 housing bills, across 33 states, aimed at increasing production. At the federal level, the recently enacted 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act similarly seeks to boost supply and reduce barriers to development. Together, these efforts reflect growing bipartisan recognition that America needs to make building homes easier, faster, and less expensive.
The question now is how to make the most of that momentum.
On September 15, the Housing Multiplier Project released a new working paper, Solving the Housing Shortage Is a Force Multiplier. The ULI Impact Lab was pleased to contribute to the research alongside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, World Resources Institute, RMI, the University of Denver’s Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions, the Federation of American Scientists Center for Regulatory Ingenuity, and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.
The central proposition is simple: If we solve the housing shortage strategically, housing can become a force multiplier for progress on other challenges.
Build More Housing—and Build for Benefits
Housing affordability is about more than rent or a mortgage payment. Where and how we build also shape what households spend on transportation, energy, insurance, and taxes. Development patterns affect municipal infrastructure costs, exposure to floods and wildfires, the electric grid, access to jobs and services, and the amount of open and working land we consume.
The new paper brings together a review of more than 150 publications, as well as interviews and conversations with experts across housing, insurance, resilience, energy, transportation, and finance. It organizes its findings around three questions: Where should we build? What should we build? And how should we build what we build?