Creating a Coalition to Build Affordable, Resilient Housing 

That we need to build much more housing, affordably and quickly, is hardly in dispute. It’s the details of where, what, and how we build that can sometimes evade consensus. But at a Lincoln Institute convening last fall, two groups that are sometimes perceived to be at odds over such details—the pro-housing community and climate action leaders—found far more common ground than disagreement.

The quest to build more affordable housing quickly, cheaply, and in as many places as possible can appear to conflict with goals related to energy efficiency and climate resilience. “There’s a perception that modernizing building codes or applying energy and resiliency standards to new housing will drive up construction costs and slow down supply,” says Solomon Greene, former executive director of Land and Communities at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a co-organizer of the convening. “But the research doesn’t bear that out—it’s possible, and necessary, to advance housing supply and resilience together.”

Once you account for the full lifecycle costs of a home, Greene points out, building less resiliently or less efficiently isn’t necessarily cheaper. When homes are built in hazardous areas, are unable to withstand climate risks, or consume excessive amounts of energy, the costs are borne by the eventual homeowner or renter, in the form of higher costs for insurance, energy, and disaster prevention and recovery.

Greene had encountered some of these tensions during his time leading the Office of Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where proposed updates to resilience and energy-efficiency standards often encountered pushback from some segments of the housing development industry. “Ultimately our goals were not that dissimilar,” he says. “But because the housing crisis and climate crisis were increasing in at least equal measure, and because resources to contend with both were scarce, it created a sort of a false sense of competition.”

Committed to addressing that disconnect, Greene partnered with Heather Clark, a senior fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to bring housing and climate leaders together at the Lincoln Institute event, where participants discovered many shared objectives. “What both groups are really looking for is more housing, a variety of housing types, in well-connected, accessible places, close to jobs and close to services,” says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute, who attended the convening. Climate advocates and housing supporters may have different reasons for seeking those goals, she notes, but “they’re asking for the same thing.”

And yet, that vision is not being realized in much of the US. We’re still not permitting and building enough new housing to meet demand in most areas, and when we do, we continue to build homes in precarious places, even as climate change causes wildfires and storms to grow more frequent and intense. Often the same legacy zoning and permitting regulations that have made it too hard to build housing have pushed new homes into higher hazard areas.

For example, in the years since 2017, when Hurricane Harvey dumped over 40 inches of rain on Greater Houston and flooded hundreds of thousands of homes, one in every five new housing units—more than 57,000 homes—has been built in a floodplain, an area prone to periodic flooding. As one convening attendee said, “A house that floods every other year isn’t affordable, no matter what you paid for it initially.”

And it’s not just Houston, says Clark, who is also chief executive at Biome Studio and coauthor of a Housing Multiplier Project policy playbook inspired by the convening. Nine out of 10 new homes built in Arizona and California between 2020 and 2022 face significant wildfire risk, Clark notes, compared with around 40 percent of older homes. And in North Carolina, for every home bought out after a disaster between 1996 and 2017, 10 more new homes were built in high-hazard areas. “Why do we continue to build in those locations?” Clark asks. “I think there’s a strong perception that we have to—that we’re desperate.”

With a background in affordable housing development, Clark understands that impulse—she agrees that we urgently need to build much more housing—but disputes the idea that we have to build everywhere, including in high-risk places, to achieve that goal. “There is enough land to solve our entire housing shortage in existing neighborhoods that are lower hazard and close to jobs, transit, and services,” Clark says. “We can get there by changing regulations to make it easier to build homes in those locations, whether that’s from new construction or by repurposing existing buildings.”

She points to a recent analysis by the Center for Geospatial Solutions—a nonprofit data and mapping enterprise launched by and operating out of the Lincoln Institute—suggesting that today’s housing shortage could be addressed by building on publicly owned land in lower risk existing neighborhoods. Ongoing analysis by World Resources Institute (WRI) also shows the potential to solve the housing shortage in existing connected neighborhoods—on parcels like parking lots and underutilized commercial buildings.

Drawing from pro-housing policies that are already working across the country, the policy playbook coauthored by Clark identifies six priority actions communities can take to get more affordable and resilient housing built in more places more quickly. As we build our way out of the housing shortage, Clark says, policy choices related to where, what, and how development occurs can unlock even more community benefits, in addition to moderating home prices and rents.

Where We Build

When homes are scarce but cheaper to build or buy in high-risk areas, many homebuyers and renters are forced to trade risk for affordability, Cotter says. “People are moving to places that are more affordable, even though they face greater risk,” she says. “That puts more people in harm’s way—more people who will be victims of disasters, and more expensive disasters for us as a society to have to deal with.”

Building a lot more housing in safer locations could change that. “If there are sufficient available, affordable home opportunities for people in the US that they don’t need to accept more risk—if they can readily find homes in places that are safer—then there won’t be such a premium on homes that are in safer places,” Cotter says. “That could go a long way toward putting us on a path to a housing market we can continue to insure, and that people can afford to get into.”

Adding infill housing to existing, transit-served neighborhoods reduces emissions, improves health for residents, and cuts household transportation costs by allowing them the option to drive less and live closer to their friends, jobs, and community. Beyond that, research suggests, it’s fiscally smart for communities to encourage infill housing. New homes built in existing neighborhoods near jobs, stores, and transit save a community an average of $21,000 per unit in infrastructure costs compared to the cost of building on the outskirts of town, according to a new study by WRI, ECOnorthwest, and Pew Charitable Trusts. The savings are ongoing, too, with such infill housing costing a community half as much to maintain each year, while producing about 13 percent more property tax revenue per acre.

What We Build

Adjusting the types of housing that can legally be built can also create immediate and enduring affordability. That means encouraging right-sized housing at prices people can afford.

In 2021, Portland, Oregon, legalized duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, cottage clusters, and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in areas formerly zoned only for single-family homes. In the next three years, some 1,400 of these smaller homes were permitted; they sold for $250,000 to $300,000 less, on average, than new single-family homes built in the same neighborhoods.

While most residential land in the United States is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, many Americans cannot afford a detached house on a large lot. Smaller starter homes and multifamily homes, though, cost less to build, purchase, heat, and cool, making them affordable to more people at the outset as well as year after year.

And because compact and multifamily homes in connected neighborhoods require less energy to heat and cool and allow more residents to walk or take transit, solving the housing shortage with this type of development would result in direct emissions savings comparable to half the country’s new car sales being electric vehicles by 2035, according to research by RMI.

That’s just the direct emissions benefits of more multifamily homes in existing neighborhoods. Housing is such a dominant segment of the US economy that “solving the housing shortage strategically has gigaton-scale emissions reduction potential,” the policy playbook states. A shift in the built environment toward efficient and grid-interactive homes can hasten the transition to clean energy and the adoption of more sustainable construction methods, improve grid resiliency, and cut household utility costs, the report suggests.

How We Build

Homes that are truly affordable—not just to buy and rent, but to live in, year after year—should be built to operate efficiently and to withstand climate risks like wildfires and hurricanes. That doesn’t cost as much as people assume.

“There’s the perception that it’s too expensive to build a resilient home or an efficient home,” Clark says. “Our analysis shows that’s actually not the case.”

New research from the University of Alabama shows that adopting hazard-resistant building codes does not systematically increase home prices or constrain supply—and that, while delaying code adoption is unlikely to improve affordability, doing so increases vulnerability to future hazards.

Regulatory requirements such as minimum parking mandates, meanwhile, can also add significantly more expense to construction than do energy efficiency measures, Clark says. Rules requiring at least two parking spots per unit, for example, add between $50,000 and $100,000 per unit to development costs. But energy efficiency upgrades on a four-story multifamily building add just $18 per apartment, according to research by HUD—a cost recovered in less than two months through the resulting energy savings. Similarly, an RMI study across nine major US cities found that all-electric single-family homes were less expensive to build and to operate than mixed-fuel houses.

Uninsurable = Unaffordable

Still, resistance to resilience standards persists—and Greene says it’s time for the housing and climate camps to join forces.

“We need to improve resiliency, because people are increasingly exposed to extreme weather and climate-related risks,” says Greene, now the inaugural executive director of the Center for Housing Research and Innovative Solutions at the University of Denver. “And neither HUD, as a public agency, nor the households living in harm’s way can afford to keep on incurring those costs and those losses. The most promising path forward is working collaboratively with developers, insurers, and communities to align incentives so that resilient, affordable housing becomes the norm.”

Greene says the biggest emerging issue facing HUD during his tenure was the growing insurance crisis. Average home insurance premiums rose 9 percent in 2025 and have more than doubled since 2019, driven largely by claims related to wildfire, hurricanes, and other climate-related hazards, and some insurers have abandoned risky markets or entire states. For examplee, State Farm, California’s largest home insurer, in 2023 stopped writing new homeowners policies in the state, while more than a dozen insurers, such as Farmers and Progressive, have stopped issuing policies in Florida. A home that costs too much to insure, or that cannot be insured at all, can hardly be considered affordable; the best way to lower those costs, Greene says, is to reduce the risk in the first place by pairing smarter land use decisions with building more resilient homes.

Meanwhile, building codes—which provide the foundation for stronger, more resilient homes—have, in many places, not kept pace with accelerating climate hazards. “If we are going to build in certain locations, we really need to make sure higher standards are in place, like what we see in Louisiana,” Clark says. “They’re requiring homes to meet a base building code and be built above a certain elevation. And Louisiana is also requiring an energy code, so the housing that’s built is more affordable over the long term.”

Likewise, Alabama has updated its building codes for new homes in certain high-risk areas, and offers incentives for owners of new and existing homes to meet Fortified Roof standards—which were shown, in a University of Alabama study, to reduce insurance claims and losses by over 70 percent after Hurricane Sally. “That work has completely changed Alabama’s insurance market for the better,” Clark says.

That said, some portions of building codes could be tweaked—particularly in lower-risk areas—to expedite construction. “We should also be looking at, for example, parts of the building code that might not make sense, like the requirement for dual staircases in small plexes—that adds a lot of cost to a building,” Clark says. So does requiring a three- or four-family house to meet the stricter commercial code, instead of the residential code required of single-family homes and duplexes. “As we increase the adoption of building codes to reduce hazard risk, let’s figure out how to make it less expensive in other ways.”

How to Supercharge Affordable, Resilient Housing

Layering together the where, what, and how of housing yields a powerful policy playbook for accelerating affordability and sustainability in tandem.

The first urgent policy action Clark and her coauthors recommend is eliminating red tape in lower-hazard existing neighborhoods. Unlike the price of lumber or labor, regulations such as parking mandates, minimum lot sizes, and zoning rules are policy choices that local governments can directly change. Other priority actions identified in the policy playbook include using city- and state-owned land in low-hazard areas for housing, normalizing disaster-prepared building standards, simplifying public financing for low-income housing, embedding energy affordability into new construction, and reforming utility rates and programs to strengthen the grid and encourage efficiency.

Colorado stands out, Clark says, for having passed a series of housing bills in recent years to make it easier and faster to permit and build housing by right—that is, without special variances required—particularly near transit. “You’re seeing more housing get built on the ground as a result,” Clark says. “What’s also exciting, though, about Colorado, is that they’re not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They’re not saying we’re going build housing everywhere and we’re going to do it without consideration for energy or resiliency.”

In conjunction with the pro-housing bills, Colorado created a Wildfire Resiliency Code to ensure new homes can better withstand wildfire risk, told insurers to factor resilience into their rate structures, and established a Model Low Energy and Carbon Code that rewards efficiency or Passive House construction. “That’s going to make sure new housing that gets built is efficient, grid interactive, and all-electric, so people are going to benefit from lower energy bills.”

Colorado also passed a bill on grid interactivity to allow for virtual power plants—meaning homeowners and renters with, say, heat pumps or solar panels and a backup battery or an electric vehicle can get paid for feeding energy back into the grid during times of peak demand. These types of agreements with utility companies help diversify and stabilize the electric grid, which is under increased stress from data centers and other demands, and can reduce the need for new fossil fuel power plants.

The reason Colorado was able to pass all those bills, Clark says, “is because they’ve built this successful coalition where they’ve brought together people who are concerned about housing, and the people who are concerned about energy and fire and resiliency, and all those different groups are supporting these various bills.”

In fact, Clark says, one of the groups that has been most effective in advocating for housing in Colorado isn’t a pro-housing organization at all—it’s a regional energy nonprofit called SWEEP, or the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. “If we’re going to get some of these bills passed that create more resilient, affordable communities, you need to have people break down those silos and really work together so that we can build more housing in the right locations.”

Building a lot of resilient housing in existing, lower-risk neighborhoods is a winning proposition for just about everyone, says Cotter of the Lincoln Institute. “There are all these cobenefits—in addition to creating more affordable housing supply and reducing emissions, it makes fiscal sense for communities, it doesn’t require as much infrastructure maintenance or initial capital investments,” she says. “There are health benefits to getting people out of their cars and being closer to community, there are health benefits when you take cars off the roads. The case for it just continues to stack up.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A fourplex in Portland, Oregon. Credit: Mark E McClure/Sightline Institute via Flickr.