National Multifamily Housing Council's Housing Affordability Toolkit

NYU Urban Lab in collaboration with the National Multifamily Housing Council has released the 2026 update to the Housing Affordability Toolkit.

Housing Affordability Can Be Solved in This Generation

America has 22.4 million rent-burdened households and a housing production rate still well below the levels needed to close the gap. This toolkit, developed with Professor Matthew Kwatinetz of the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate, makes the case that rental housing affordability is not an intractable problem but a solvable one. Drawing on original data analysis and a comprehensive scan of housing policy research, the report charts a three-part path to affordability through local deregulation, preservation of naturally occurring affordable housing and targeted public subsidy. It also introduces a new metric, Time to Address (TTA), to measure how quickly different policies can move the needle.

What’s Included in the Toolkit

  • A sizing of today’s affordability shortfall: 22.4 million rent-burdened households and the demand-side math behind it
  • Time to Address (TTA), a new metric that measures how quickly a given policy can move the needle at scale
  • Policy case studies on deregulation, tax incentives and NOAH preservation, each graded on speed, scale, cost and targeting
  • A coordinated three-part policy pipeline sized to close the gap within a generation
  • Housing 101 reference materials covering development finance, feasibility economics and a full Affordable Housing Glossary

How to Use the Toolkit

The toolkit is designed to work both as a complete argument and as a modular reference.

Download the full report for the end-to-end case: why rental housing affordability is solvable within a generation, why no single policy gets there alone and what a realistic, coordinated pipeline looks like.

NYC's Affordable Housing Crisis

The NYU Urban Lab continues to create thought leadership around public and affordable housing, as well as housing equity more generally. We participated in the AIA and Schack hosted “NYC’s Affordable Housing Crisis” event in May 2022, which video may be found here. This event brought together experts from the Federal, State and City government in conversation with academics across NYU and other schools, and industry participants in the non-profit and for-profit sectors. In Fall 2022, the NYU Urban Lab completed and published a research paper and transcript of the event. We then partnered on a release event with the NYC Center for Architecture in November 2022.

Housing Affordability and the Basket of Goods in Reno, Nevada

NYU Urban Lab graduate researchers work on the affordability of housing to analyze the economics of market rate and affordable housing in the Reno MSA and determine if it is possible to profitably develop housing which matches the various income levels of the population, or if public intervention is needed. We have developed an outline to guide our research and the creation of an initial analytic model focused on residual land value and compared this to current assessor data for the county. We were then able to work with a local General Contractor to create anticipated construction budgets. Utilizing this research alongside NYU GIS tools, we have begun to flesh out a Reno impact strategy. In addition to the Reno work, in this last year we added two new student researchers – Chandana Reddy and Disha Aggarwal. These students learned about our methodology and expanded the REno work. In addition, they began the process of extending this methodology and work to cover the Los Angeles and Philadelphia MSAs. This work will continue in 2023-2024.

Philanthropy and Housing Equity

In April 2023, NYU Urban Lab partnered with the SPS Center for Global Affairs to produce and moderate a panel on “How Philanthropy Can Advance Housing Equity” which was recorded and published.

Interactive Data Explorers