For Immediate Release
New Research: Strategic Housing Policies Can Solve America’s Housing Shortage Faster and More Cost-Effectively — and Lower the Cost of Living, Strengthen Insurance Markets, Ease Strain on the Grid, and Cut Pollution
September 16, 2026 – The Housing Multiplier Project launches today to help states and localities solve the housing shortage faster and more cost effectively — and make housing a force multiplier for progress. Its inaugural white paper, Solving the Housing Shortage is a Force Multiplier, co-published with the Federation of American Scientists Center for Regulatory Ingenuity, lays out the most impactful policies communities can adopt to stimulate home production at the scale and speed the country needs.
Their research comes at a pivotal moment for housing policy. The United States needs to build millions of homes to bring down housing costs, and policymakers at every level are taking action—from hundreds of recently enacted state and local bills to the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in Congress.
“There’s more momentum around housing than we’ve seen in a generation, and that creates a massive opportunity,” says Heather Clark, Founder and CEO of the Housing Multiplier Project. “This is our chance to think bigger about what solving the housing shortage can accomplish — and our research shows just how much is possible.”
“When we loosen strangleholds on housing production, opportunity abounds,” says Dr. Hannah Safford, Associate Director of Climate and Environment at the Federation of American Scientists, a co-publisher of the paper. “But it’s not a guarantee that the policies governments enact will be the right ones for getting the homes Americans want at the speed and scale they need. The FAS Center for Regulatory Ingenuity is proud to partner with the Housing Multiplier Project on identifying and implementing the strategies to ensure we build for benefits.”
Given today’s fiscal constraints, the paper focuses on state and local policies that require limited public dollars — reforms that prime the pump for market forces, private capital, and targeted public investment to get homes built. Drawing on evidence from what’s working across the country, their research finds that policies that generate the most housing production share a throughline: they remove the restrictions and barriers that create artificial scarcity and simply make it easier to build.
But that’s only the first step. Their paper also challenges the idea that policymakers must choose between building more homes and pursuing other priorities. Many of the same policies that make it easier and less expensive to build can also lower transportation and energy costs, reduce disaster risk and bolster insurance markets, strengthen fiscal health, ease strain on the electric grid, protect our open and wild lands, and cut emissions.
To realize those benefits, their evidence overwhelmingly points to being strategic about where, what, and how we build. The benefits of solving the national housing shortage multiply if homes are built in established lower hazard neighborhoods with access to jobs and services and if new homes come in more shapes and sizes – think starter homes, duplexes, small apartment buildings.
Their work also points to the benefits of building homes prepared for disaster. More resilient homes in lower-hazard neighborhoods reduce physical risk, which improves the risk profile of insurance pools and bolsters insurance markets for new and existing homes alike. They also make the case for treating homes as critical grid infrastructure: efficient homes that operate as virtual power plants lower utility bills and, at scale, free capacity on the nation’s strained grid, reduce the need for new fossil fuel peaker plants, and make better use of utility-scale clean energy.
The paper shares that building the right kinds of homes in the right places can:
- Lower housing, transportation, and energy costs
- Bolster insurance markets across entire regions and states
- Save an average of $700 per person per year in fuel and vehicle costs through shorter commutes and less driving
- Save taxpayers an average of $21,000 per home in infrastructure costs and generate 13% more tax revenue per acre compared with greenfield development
- Strengthen the grid and reduce the need for new fossil fuel peaker plants
- Spare up to 13.5 million acres of farm and ranchland and 19 million acres of wildlands from development
- Reduce emissions at a base by 70 million tons per year — roughly equal to half the country buying only electric vehicles by 2035
The paper also presents evidence that there is enough available land in established lower-hazard neighborhoods to solve the nation’s housing shortage without building on farmland, forests, or wildlands. And that making an entire home energy efficient costs far less than common regulations, such as parking mandates — often by orders of magnitude.
To increase housing production with benefits, the paper identifies six tactics that states and localities can pursue with limited public dollars: remove barriers to more housing types in lower hazard established neighborhoods; put public land to work for housing; simplify public financing; make disaster-resilient construction the norm; build lower utility costs into new homes from the start and position homes as critical grid infrastructure; and align utility reforms with housing affordability and grid reliability.
This research was led by the Housing Multiplier Project and the Federation of American Scientists Center for Regulatory Ingenuity in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, with co-authors from MIT, the Urban Land Institute, World Resources Institute, RMI, the University of Denver’s Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions, and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.
