What to Watch For: National Housing Supply Summit Takeaways

I was fortunate to attend the National Housing Supply Summit in March, an all-day event cohosted by the Housing Innovation Alliance, HousingTech, and The George Washington University at the National Housing Center, in Washington, D.C.

More than 300 attendees listened and learned from a wide variety of industry stakeholders—builders, policymakers, academics, researchers, regulators, and economists among them—about the multiple headwinds facing housing supply and attainability.

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Speakers and panel discussions focused on everything from land use to insurance, shedding light on not just those issues but how they connect and affect one another. It was a bold first step to address the daunting complexity of how to build more homes that more Americans can afford.

Areas of Focus in the Effort to Boost Housing Production

It also inspired a rethink of Pro Builder’s approach to covering those issues with in-depth reporting of key components of that landscape, namely:

Homeowners Insurance

Of all the headwinds discussed at the summit, this was arguably the hottest topic. As natural disasters continue to intensify in frequency and severity—and not just along the coasts anymore—the ability of homebuyers to secure adequate and affordable insurance to rebuild is in serious peril, with few obvious solutions.

Regulatory reform

Perhaps more so in the long term than import tariffs and immigrant deportations (which at this writing are more rhetoric than discernible policy), the rules that govern our industry—at least at the federal level—are expected to undergo reforms that could reduce the cost of home building. Even so, the feds have little influence over state and local policies that affect housing supply and affordability, except perhaps through financial incentives for public or private-public projects.

Resilient housing

Consider this the new “sustainability.” Building homes that are resilient is as a step up that enables a house to operate more independently of increasingly outdated infrastructure, better withstand natural events (and thus reduce full replacements to just modest repairs to a home), and champion higher construction quality and greater durability.

I could fill twice this space describing other related issues from the summit that we hope to cover in these pages and online, but these three are at the top of my list right now.

I encourage you to reach out to me directly with ideas, anecdotes, wins, and fail-forwards that will help us paint these pictures and shed greater light on not just the problems, but eventually, hopefully, real-world solutions as well.