National Housing Conference (NHC) President and CEO David M. Dworkin addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Fall Leadership Meeting on September 25, highlighting the growing impact of housing affordability on cities and their workforces and the role mayors can play in expanding housing supply. Dworkin also discussed implementation of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act and the need to move quickly to translate the new law into meaningful action at the federal and local levels.
Below are Dworkin’s remarks as prepared for delivery:
“When the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11, Mayor Gloria said the solution is simple: “build more homes to lower costs.” Then he added, “Now it’s time to deliver.” Well, as every mayor knows better than anyone, voters care about what we do, not what we say. Delivery is job 1 for all of us.
Your own survey, released last week, makes clear what you are hearing. Of 113 mayors, 96 percent say residents are very or extremely concerned about affordability and point to housing costs as the cause. Nearly half say it is harder to attract and keep workers.
NHC’s Paycheck to Paycheck database shows why. In a report we will be releasing shortly, we compare what workers in nearly 300 occupations earn where they live with what it takes to rent or buy a home in 390 metropolitan areas. Combining those datasets gives us a comprehensive perspective on the housing affordability crisis. We also examine what individual occupations face when renting in their community with the wages they earn there.
- In 193 metro areas, buying a typical home now requires a six-figure income. In 2019, that was true in only 30.
- And nearly half of occupation-metro area combinations, 48 percent, cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened.
A few examples.
- A firefighter earning $63,000 in Colorado Springs can no longer afford a two-bedroom apartment there.
- Neither can a cement mason earning $47,000 in Oklahoma City.
- A nurse practitioner earning $140,000 in St. George, Utah, can no longer afford to buy a typically priced home there.
These are the people who staff your fire stations, repair your streets, and care for your residents. When they can’t live where they work, you don’t just have an affordability problem.
You and every business in your city have a recruiting problem, a public safety problem, an economic development problem, and a transportation problem. No one knows this better than you because you see it in your budgets and your vacancy lists and on your highways.
And you see it on your sidewalks because housing is a continuum, and unaffordable homeownership puts supply pressure on unaffordable rental units, and unaffordable rental units lead to increases in homelessness.
Tomorrow you will hear from Congressman Mike Flood, who chairs the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance. In June, the National Housing Conference presented him and Ranking Member Emanuel Cleaver – a former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri – with our Carl A.S. Coan, Sr., Lifetime Achievement Award for Public Service at our Housing Visionary Awards Gala. I was with Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill last week and he still marvels at their achievement, made possible by his own unprecedented collaboration with Ranking Member Maxine Waters. In the Senate, Banking and Housing Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren worked together on their bill. And then, the hardest part: the House and Senate worked together and came up with one bill that became law!
Much of what matters most to you carries Chairman Flood’s name: the HOME reforms he wrote with Congressman Cleaver; the Community Development Block Grant construction authority he championed with Congressman Sam Liccardo, a former mayor of San Jose; the environmental review streamlining; and the housing supply frameworks. When he is here tomorrow, you’ll have a chance to thank him yourself.
Some provisions of the bill begin immediately. Starting October 1, every CDBG grantee must keep a public, searchable online database of the undeveloped land it owns, and CDBG funds can help pay for it.
CDBG can now fund new affordable housing construction, up to 20 percent of your allocation. For most of its half-century history, it generally could not. And the Flood-Cleaver HOME Reform Act reauthorizes the program, raises income and price limits to reflect today’s markets and allows HOME to pay for infrastructure tied to new housing, like sidewalks, sewers and utility connections.
The Build Now provisions tie part of each entitlement community’s CDBG allocation to housing growth. HUD measures growth in housing units over five years against the median for all grantees. Communities above the median can earn a bonus of up to 10 percent; those below can lose as much as 10 percent. There are exemptions for lower-rent markets, high rental vacancy, a disaster or emergency declaration in the prior year, and places where state law bars the city from changing its zoning or permitting. Adjustments begin in fiscal year 2029 at the earliest, with a two-year grace period for communities at risk of a reduction.
Here in San Diego, Mayor Gloria has shown us what local reform can do. In 2023 and 2024, the city permitted an average of more than 9,000 homes a year, more than double its average over the previous two decades. That is the kind of performance Build Now is designed to reward.
The bill also includes new programs that will require new money. The Innovation Fund is authorized at $200 million a year, with grants up to $10 million for communities that show measurable housing supply growth. And CDBG-Disaster Recovery is now authorized in statute for three years, with a proposed rule due by January 11, 2027. For cities that have waited on each supplemental appropriation, predictability matters. But we still must appropriate the money so it’s ready.
In Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, they say, “we hire skilled, dedicated people to do the public’s work, and then make it impossible for them to do that work well.” Last year I visited Mercy Housing’s Tahanan development in San Francisco. 145 homes of permanent supportive housing that cost less than $400,000 per unit. It was built in about half the usual time, largely by avoiding layered public funding and using state streamlining. That’s what is possible. But the 90-unit affordable housing development at 2550 Irving Street cost more than $1.1 million per unit, and a single state funding application ran 359 pages. Layers of complexity have a cost, and the families waiting for those homes pay it. That is too often the case.
Federal environmental review is one of those layers. Environmental review exists for real reasons like preventing contamination and mitigating flood risk. But the test should be one of materiality, not mere existence. And the process must be transparent and rapid. Delay costs money and kills projects.
Too often, environmental review is used not to protect the environment, but to delay and ultimately kill projects on behalf of residents who don’t want affordable housing “changing the historic character of our neighborhood,” which is code we all understand. To them, I say, if you don’t want affordable housing in your back yard, you’re going to end up with homeless people in your front yard, and we don’t have to go far to see what that looks like. Under ROAD, small HOME projects, including new construction of 15 units or fewer, infill and acquisition, have been exempt from duplicative review since July 11. We believe this provision does not require new regulation. It is the law right now.
Chairman Flood’s bill with Congressman Liccardo directs HUD to exempt or categorically exclude more housing activities, from small infill and rehabilitation to rental assistance. And HUD can delegate more reviews to states and localities. More than 50 provisions in ROAD still require new regulations, administrative procedures, or guidance. A process that can take years. In some cases, a LOT of years. That’s time we simply don’t have.
We have seen this movie before. The Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act passed unanimously in 2016. It took nearly seven years to publish the final rule, and HUD is still extending compliance dates. It’s no wonder some began calling it not HOTMA, but Hot Mess. If ROAD takes even half as long, we will have failed a generation of renters and buyers. There’s a better way.
The traditional regulatory process runs backward: agencies write rules in isolation, stakeholders critique them, and everyone spends years revising and litigating. We want the same spirit of collaboration that passed the bill to guide its implementation. NHC’s Housing Supply Working Group, co-chaired by Stockton Williams of the National Council of State Housing Agencies and Marisa Calderon of Prosperity Now, is developing stakeholder-vetted recommendations and draft regulatory language before agencies write their proposals.
To do that at the speed we need, NHC has made a major investment in agentic AI with a generous grant from Wells Fargo Foundation. This technology accelerates drafting and helps identify and resolve differences. The goal is to make available to HUD and the other agencies consensus draft language at the start of the process and save the agencies months, if not years, of work. And we are confident we can do this well within the four corners of the Administrative Procedure Act.
I have told senior Administration officials that we are fully invested in their success, because durable rules slow the policy pendulum, and the pendulum is the enemy of anyone financing a long-term asset. We won’t agree on everything they do. But we will be able to discuss our differences in a timely manner and build a regulatory architecture that is sustainable.
Last week, Mayor Gloria called ROAD an important first step, “but there is much more work to do.” He is correct. That work is happening right now, and we need each other to make it a success.”