How We Can Build More: Piloting a New Approach to Affordable and Market Rate Housing

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

California is on the leading edge of a national housing crisis. Creating affordable housing has become a central goal for local governments facing persistent homelessness, constrained housing supply, and growing unaffordability across the state. In Alameda County, one of the densest and most urbanized counties of the San Francisco Bay Area, we are on the forefront of this struggle, with over a third of our 581,685 households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. After years focused on funding large-scale, deeply affordable multifamily projects, we are developing a new approach. 

In 2016, Alameda County voters passed Measure A1, an affordable housing bond, which ultimately raised $580 million. Over the last decade, Alameda County’s Housing and Community Development Department (HCD), where I work as a Housing Specialist, has invested $425 million in Measure A1 funds in over 50 projects and built over 4,000 affordable units, including over 1,200 units for households making less than 20 percent of Area Median Income (AMI). While these housing units are vital for the households able to access them, our county’s broader housing crisis persists, as evidenced by consistently increasing rents and the high rates of housing cost burden across all demographics. Worse, the lack of immediately observable impact has nearly exhausted public support and funding for tackling the crisis. 

In response, my department has developed an alternative approach focused on planning streamlining, preapproved designs, innovative partnerships, and simplified financing. The Scalable Housing Infill Funding Toolkit program, or SHIFT, is our replicable model for building affordable housing faster, in more places, and at a lower cost.

SHIFT will use a variety of proven policy innovations sourced from the Bay Area’s extensive community of housing developers, funders, and policy experts to make small-scale multifamily—or “missing middle”—housing possible. While this kind of four- to twelve-unit housing was once common, it has become increasingly difficult for private or affordable developers to build, despite the increasing need to add gentle density to largely built-out areas. SHIFT reopens the path for affordable infill development by focusing on smaller sized projects well-suited to a wide variety of undervalued and underutilized parcels. 

Where traditional affordable housing is severely limited by the availability of suitable sites, increasingly scarce and uncertain public funding—especially Low Income Housing Tax Credits—and the finite capacity of large nonprofit developers to undertake hundred-million-dollar projects, SHIFT imagines a more flexible, accessible, and predictable process. Key to this process will be an expanded pool of development partners, including small property owners, emerging developers, independent property managers, and local nonprofits. This will broaden the coalition of stakeholders with a meaningful role to play in affordable housing creation, and provide opportunities to integrate new perspectives and innovations into the development process. 

Projects funded by SHIFT will receive a standard, upfront, per-unit loan at the start of development, which will be their only source of public funds. Instead of applying or reapplying for the dozens of funding sources usually needed to get a large-scale, tax credit-financed, affordable housing project off the ground, developers will have their entire public subsidy reliably committed at the start of development. In addition, SHIFT projects will be able to use the program’s full toolkit of preapproved designs— streamlining methodology, technical assistance, and prequalified developer partners to further speed up development and reliability estimate project costs. Finally, SHIFT projects will be able to leverage new technologies like the Bay Area’s Doorway housing portal to reduce administrative frictions in affordable housing administration, making scattered-site and small operator approaches viable.

While publicly subsidized affordable housing is one of SHIFT’s key objectives, the program is designed to make private development easier, cheaper, and faster to build. While direct funding will only be available to projects that make units affordable to households earning between 60 and 80 percent of AMI, the rest of the toolkit will be available to private developers for use supporting market-rate projects. By spreading these innovations and resources to a wider audience, SHIFT aims to address our housing crisis more broadly than any of our previous efforts to fund affordable units alone. 

Currently, Alameda County HCD is preparing SHIFT’s first development phase. In December, we selected Inspired ADUs to act as the program design consultant and develop replicable architectural designs for the program. Soon they will begin taking their initial designs through the approval process with the planning departments of each of our initial participating cities. This is the first step down a path of continuous iteration, which we hope will yield a library of adaptable designs and reliable cost estimates. We estimate that, using the full toolkit of cost saving practices, SHIFT projects will produce affordable housing for at least 25 percent less per unit than the Bay Area standard (currently around $850,000 per unit for new affordable construction). 

In spring 2026, we will also launch our first pool procurement for developers, property managers, nonprofit partners, and architectural firms. This is the first of many administrative innovations we will pilot through SHIFT aiming to dramatically lower the barriers and costs related to partnering with local governments to produce housing. We believe that when fully realized, SHIFT can be a model for local governments hungry to serve as a platform for developing new solutions to our national housing crises.