September 12, 2025 | by Michael Wilt
Categories: Affordable Housing, Construction, Rental Housing
Earlier this year, the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing released its Building the Future 2025 report that summarizes policies gaining traction at the local and state level to meet the housing needs of our country's changing population.
As noted in the introduction, the report offers up actionable ideas and serves "as a roadmap for modernizing housing systems, connecting public resources, and leveraging capital and land to address our most urgent housing needs." It's broken down into four sections: reform, connect, leverage, and progress. We'll take a closer look at each and highlight policies with a focus on trends in Texas.
The reform section turns an eye towards the regulatory environment that governs housing production, specifically zoning updates, faster permitting, and property tax abatements. The most common tool has been zoning reform, widely employed by larger cities and smaller ones. Reforms include more by-right development, encouraging denser housing developments and allowing for smaller lots with the overall goal of increasing housing production.
The report highlights tax exemptions in Texas for some affordable developments but notes that the arrangements have come under scrutiny. These exemptions have been reformed through Legislative action to ensure that deeper levels of affordability are attained in exchange for property tax relief.
This section examines how "jurisdictions are aligning housing with infrastructure, data, and public land strategies to unlock coordinated impact." From transit-oriented developments that promote dense, walkable, neighborhoods to linking infrastructure upgrades to housing, thinking strategically about where 
housing investments should be made is at the center of many local planning processes.
Similarly, cities are also looking at how public land and facilities can be converted into housing opportunities. The report profiles the City of Austin's work with Municipal Property Advisors to "identify, evaluate, and activate underutilized public assets for community benefit, particularly affordable housing." Pictured right, Talavera Lofts in Austin is an affordable community built on public surplus land.
As housing gets more expensive to build, this section explores what communities are doing to maximize capital investments and introduce new housing typologies to introduce more affordable products.
On the capital side, states like Georgia and Tennessee have successfully amplified the impact of the federal low-income housing tax credit with a state complement while Michigan has used tax increment financing to capture tax revenue from brownfield redevelopments and redeploy that capital into housing investments.
Moreover, municipalities and states are encouraging new and under-utilized housing typologies like microunits, single-room occupancy homes, tiny home villages, cooperative housing, modular housing, and more to deliver affordable homes, especially in high cost of living areas. Houston is exploring office to micro-apartment conversions to deliver deeply affordable housing in vacant office towers.
The last section looks back at policies highlighted in the 2024 version of this report to track their progress. Policies like Florida's Live Local Act that offers incentives to create housing and Atlanta's Affordable Housing Strike Force Fund that maximizes the use of public land for housing have moved the needle in their respective communities to respond to housing demands.
For a more detailed look at any of the above policies and to explore many other ones, we encourage you to read the full report.
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