Sequencing matters more than policy selection. Three parallel tracks, grounded in what your market is actually doing.
Raquel Favela, Founder & CEOApril 16, 2026 · 15 min read
Key takeaways
- Communities that improve affordability follow the same sequence: diagnose, fix process, then add subsidy, while building public trust throughout.
- Run three tracks at once for 12 months: Supply and Process, Subsidy and Preservation, and Trust and Accountability.
- Start with a market analysis. It decides which track to front-load and which tools fit your neighborhoods.
- Report results publicly, including what didn't work. That honesty sustains the effort across election cycles.
Every community that has succeeded at improving housing affordability did roughly the same thing. Not the same policies. Not the same tools. The same sequence.
- They diagnosed before they prescribed.
- They fixed process before they added subsidy.
- They built trust publicly before they asked residents to believe change was coming.
This post is the practical companion to everything covered in this series. In posts 1 through 4, we established the framework: build more and subsidize better, cut the time tax, understand your market, and size subsidy correctly. If you have not read those, they are linked above. They matter, because this playbook is not a template. This playbook is a sequence. And the right sequence depends on what kind of market you are in.
What follows is organized into three parallel tracks that run simultaneously across 12 months. You do not finish one before you start the next. Ideally, you staff them in parallel, report on them together, and hold your team accountable for progress across all three.
The three tracks are: Supply and Process, Subsidy, Preservation, and Ownership, and Trust and Accountability.
What This Playbook Is Not
This is not a comprehensive housing strategy. A full housing strategy requires a market analysis, a needs assessment, a funding plan, and a governance structure. This playbook assumes those exist or are being developed in parallel. If they are not, start with the market analysis. Everything else follows from it.
This is not a substitute for political will. The moves in each track require elected officials who are willing to hold departments accountable, make difficult decisions about subsidy, and tell the truth in public even when results are mixed. No playbook substitutes for that.
And this is not a one-size-fits-all prescription. The three tracks below are comprehensive by design, they cover the full range of what communities can do across supply, subsidy, and trust. But no community does all of it at once. The right set of tactics depends on your market context, your institutional capacity, and your available staffing and budget. Read the tracks as a menu, not a mandate. Your market analysis and your honest assessment of local capacity are what determine which actions to prioritize and in what order.
Before You Start Any Track: Know Your Market
Market context is not a footnote to this playbook. It is the prerequisite for all of it. The pace, emphasis, and specific actions within each track should reflect what your market is actually doing at the neighborhood and corridor level, not just the citywide average.
This is where many affordability strategies quietly break down. As we discussed in post 3, communities frequently borrow tools from other cities without first diagnosing whether their local challenge is about cost, supply, time, risk, or displacement. A tool that solves one problem can actively worsen another.
The most rigorous public-sector approach to this diagnosis is the Market Value Analysis (MVA), developed by the Reinvestment Fund. The MVA uses spatial and cluster analysis to sort neighborhoods into distinct market typologies based on local administrative data: code violations, utility disconnection notices, calls for abandoned buildings, foreclosure filings, vacancy rates, permit activity, and subsidy concentrations. What makes it particularly powerful is its field validation step: before any typology is finalized, local real estate professionals, housing practitioners, and community development experts review the results and confirm whether the data-driven classifications match on-the-ground reality.
The MVA is perhaps best suited for larger, denser urban markets where the data is rich enough and the market variation complex enough to yield actionable typologies. Cities including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Dallas, Kansas City, and Jacksonville have used it to guide everything from capital improvement programs to subsidy deployment. In mid-sized cities like Richmond, Virginia and Chattanooga, Tennessee, simplified versions of the MVA framework have also been adapted successfully, though with more reliance on field validation to compensate for thinner administrative data.
For smaller or suburban communities where housing markets may be less segmented and administrative data less granular a full MVA may not be the right tool. In those contexts, a structured practitioner scan using the same data inputs is often more practical: pull permit activity, code violations, and property sales by neighborhood, then convene a small working group of local lenders, nonprofit developers, and city staff to interpret the patterns. The goal is the same as the MVA, a shared, evidence-based picture of where the market is working and where it is not even if the method is less formal.
From Diagnosis to Strategy: Setting Goals, Priorities, and Budget
Market analysis tells you what is happening. It does not tell you what to do about it. That next step: translating diagnosis into a prioritized, budgeted strategy, is where many communities stall.
Before you begin running the three tracks below, your community should be able to answer four question
- What specific housing problem are you trying to solve? Not "affordability" in the abstract. Is it that the lowest-income residents cannot afford market-rate housing? That middle-income families cannot find ownership opportunities near jobs? That the approval process is killing feasibility for smaller builders? Each needs different tactics.
- What does success look like in 12 months? Set a small number of measurable targets: permit timelines cut by a set percentage, NOAH units preserved, subsidized units occupied at the right income levels, ownership pathways created. They are also what you will report publicly in Track 3.
- What can your community realistically staff and fund? A community with two planning staff will run a different version of this playbook than a city with a full housing department. Overcommitting to tactics you cannot execute erodes the public trust Track 3 is designed to build.
- Which track should you front-load? Fast-growth metros usually lead with Track 1, because removing process friction unlocks production without subsidy. Legacy and disinvested communities often front-load Track 2. Communities rebuilding trust after failed plans may need to start with Track 3.
The Three Tracks: A 12-Month Sequence
With your market analysis complete and your goals and budget established, you are ready to run the tracks. Each one is organized into three phases of roughly equal length. The month ranges — 1–3, 4–8, and 9–12 — reflect the sequence of activities within each track, not fixed calendar deadlines. Adjust them to fit your community’s pace and capacity.
Supply and Process
Make housing legal, predictable, and buildable, for all housing types.
This track addresses the barriers that keep housing from being built in the first place. As we explored in Part 2, delay and uncertainty are cost drivers. Every month a project sits in entitlement is a month of carrying costs, risk premium, and lost feasibility. This track is about removing those frictions systematically, not project by project.
The goal at the end of 12 months is not a completed policy overhaul. It is a functioning fast lane, a named pipeline, and a visible reduction in time-to-permit for code-conforming projects, multifamily and for-sale housing alike. Homeownership production depends on the same predictable process infrastructure as rental development.
This track also intersects with development subsidy. When approval timelines are long and unpredictable, gap financing requests go up, because developers are pricing delay risk into their pro formas. When timelines are compressed and requirements are clear, financing gaps shrink. The tools in this track work best when they are coordinated with your subsidy framework, not treated as a separate pipeline.
The first move is not to pass an ordinance. It is to name reality publicly.
- Audit your pipeline. Pull every housing project in some stage of entitlement. Map where each one is stuck: plan check, fire, utilities, discretionary review, or something else. Map multifamily, for-sale subdivisions, and missing-middle projects separately. The friction points differ by type.
- Publish your Top 20 Sites. Identify the 20 publicly owned or opportunity sites best positioned for housing. Publish their zoning, height limits, parking requirements, and estimated approval timelines. Note which suit rental development, which suit ownership, and which could support both. Sites on the list should be moving.
- Map your approval timeline by step. Break out pre-application, completeness review, plan check, public notice, hearing, and issuance. Find the three steps that consume the most time. Those are your first targets.
- Set a public baseline. Publish your current median time-to-permit for multifamily and for-sale projects. Commit to cutting it by a specific percentage in 12 months. It is not a guarantee. It is a governing commitment that forces internal accountability.
Once you know where the friction lives, build the system that removes it.
- Create a by-right Greenlight track. For projects that conform to adopted zoning, height, and design standards, establish a streamlined review path without discretionary hearings. Clarity is an affordability tool. Los Angeles's executive directives ordering ministerial review of affordable housing within 60 days produced thousands of additional approvals in the first year.
- Implement parallel processing. Run planning, building, fire, and utilities reviews concurrently where legally permissible. Los Angeles's Parallel Development Process cut major project timelines from roughly six years to four. Auburn, Washington cut up to a year from residential review the same way.
- Stand up an interdepartmental project review team. San Antonio's former "Scrub Team," a joint review body for development financing requests, is a model worth replicating. One coordinated meeting replaced multiple sequential reviews, and conditional commitments gave developers the certainty to secure the rest of their capital stack. It is especially effective for projects using tax increment financing, CDBG, or Section 108.
- Lock in utility coordination timelines. Require service capacity confirmation within 60 days of application for sites on your Top 20 list. If your utility is a separate agency, this requires an interagency agreement. Sign it.
- Standardize plan sets for common building types. Pre-approved plans for missing-middle, small multifamily, and for-sale infill eliminate most of the back-and-forth in plan check. San Diego's free ADU handbook and Kalamazoo's pattern book show how. Apply the same logic to townhomes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings.
- Align your zoning with your ownership goals. Missing-middle for-sale product, such as duplexes, triplexes, courtyard homes, and small-lot subdivisions, provides homeownership pathways that apartments cannot. If these still need discretionary review where demand exists, legalize them.
- Report publicly on time-to-permit by housing type. Publish quarterly: median approval timelines, projects in each stage of review, and units approved, started, and completed. Make it boring and routine. Boredom in public data is a sign of institutional health.
- Identify what did not work and fix it. By month 9, you will know where the remaining friction lives. Fix those things explicitly. Name them publicly.
- Prepare the next cycle. The goal is not to finish a 12-month initiative. It is to build a system that continuously improves.
Subsidy, Preservation, and Ownership
Target public dollars where the market cannot go, for renters and owners alike.
This track builds on Part 3 and Part 4. Subsidy is not a default tool. It is a targeted intervention calibrated to your submarket. Most subsidy conversations focus almost entirely on rental housing. That is a mistake. Homeownership is an affordability tool: in fast-growth markets it relieves pressure on the rental system, and in disinvested markets it builds community wealth and stabilizes neighborhoods.
The goal at the end of 12 months is not to have funded the most projects. It is to have a clear, independently verified framework for when subsidy is warranted, how much is appropriate, for which tenure, and how outcomes will be tracked.
- Conduct a submarket analysis using local administrative data. Classify your submarkets: strong markets where the private sector can deliver without subsidy, transitional markets where targeted investment can catalyze private activity, and distressed markets where public subsidy is structural. Without this analysis, you are subsidizing by anecdote.
- Audit your existing subsidized portfolio. For every project subsidized in the last five years: Is it performing financially? Are income-restricted units leased to the households they were designed for? Did the subsidy match an independently verified gap, or the developer's ask?
- Establish your independent underwriting standard. Define acceptable assumptions for construction costs, developer return, operating expenses, and comparable rents or sale prices, and who has the expertise to verify them. Letting developers size their own subsidy is a negotiation you do not know you are losing.
- Stand up a NOAH preservation fund or protocol. Preserving naturally occurring affordable housing is cheaper than new construction, faster to complete, and directly prevents displacement. How much priority it gets should reflect your local housing stock.
- Size development subsidies to verified gaps only. Require an independent pro forma review before approval, and confirm the project cannot proceed without the subsidy.
- Design ownership subsidies separately from rental subsidies. Shared-equity models, community land trusts, deed restrictions, down payment assistance, and limited-equity cooperatives all need resale restrictions, or affordability disappears in a single transaction.
- Expand project-based vouchers or local rental assistance where household gaps exist. Montgomery County, Maryland and Chicago are often-cited examples of local programs filling gaps federal programs do not reach. Landlord risk-mitigation funds have expanded voucher use in Denver and Seattle.
- Separate development, household, and ownership subsidy in your budget and reporting. They are different tools solving different problems. Conflating them makes it impossible to know whether your dollars are working.
- Report on subsidy outcomes by tenure and income band. How many rental and ownership units were funded, at what income levels are they occupied, and are deed-restricted homes reselling affordably? Publish quarterly alongside your supply data.
- Revise your subsidy framework based on what you learned. If you were subsidizing in markets that did not need it, stop. If ownership units resell above restricted prices, the structure is wrong. Redirect dollars and fix structures.
Trust and Accountability
Residents judge affordability by delivery, not by policy.
This is the track most communities neglect, and it is the one that determines whether the other two take hold. Residents have watched plans get adopted and ignored, and promises go unfulfilled. That skepticism is earned. Rebuilding trust requires showing your work, consistently, over time.
It does not require separate staff. It requires that supply and subsidy data become public by default, and that communications are honest about what is working and what is not.
- Launch a housing dashboard. Track permits by housing type, starts, completions, time-to-permit, subsidized units by income level and tenure, and preservation deals. Publish before you have good news to report. That signals credibility.
- Name your housing problem accurately in public. Name the specific problems, using your submarket analysis as the evidence.
- Bring trusted messengers to the front. In many communities the real trusted messengers are tenant associations, block clubs, faith communities, and neighborhood groups that were accountable long before any city program arrived. Put them in front of the story.
- Stop announcing plans. Start announcing deliveries. When you announce a program, say exactly when residents will see results, then report against that date, whether you hit it or not.
- Engage residents when their input can still shape outcomes. Input after projects are designed and financed is not engagement. It is theater. Move it upstream to the planning and policy level.
- Address displacement risk and ownership opportunity together. Report on anti-displacement tools and on ownership pathways created. Framing affordability as both protection and opportunity is more durable politically.
- Report what did not work. The communities that rebuild trust fastest are not the ones with the best results. They are the ones that tell the truth about imperfect results and show they are learning.
- Celebrate delivery, not process. Do not hold a press event for a policy adoption. Hold it for a ribbon cutting.
How the Tracks Connect
These three tracks are not independent. They are designed to reinforce each other.
The market analysis and goal-setting that precede all three tracks is what allows the reinforcement to be precise. Without it, each track operates on assumptions about what the market needs. With it, each track is calibrated to what is actually happening block by block.
Process reform in Track 1 reduces the cost and risk of development, which reduces the size of the financing gap that Track 2 needs to close. Smaller gaps mean subsidy dollars stretch further and reach more households: renters and owners. Better subsidy design in Track 2 produces projects that actually perform, which gives Track 3 something real to report on. And transparent reporting in Track 3 creates the public trust that sustains political support for the process reforms in Track 1.
Homeownership threads through all three tracks: legalized and expedited in Track 1, specifically designed for in Track 2, and communicated as opportunity alongside protection in Track 3.
Communities that run all three tracks together, grounded in a shared understanding of their market and an honest assessment of their capacity, move faster and sustain progress longer than those that treat them as separate initiatives.
Where to Go From Here
Affordability is not a mystery. It is a test of execution.
The communities that are making progress are not the ones with the most sophisticated policies. They are the ones that have diagnosed their actual problem, sequenced their responses in the right order, and built enough public trust to sustain the effort across election cycles.
The next and final post in this series will bring together everything from posts 1 through 5 into a concise reference guide: the key questions to ask, the warning signs to watch for, and the criteria for knowing whether your affordability strategy is working.
Raquel advises communities and mission-driven partners on housing and community development strategy, with a focus on execution and aligning policy goals with market realities. Full profile · LinkedIn
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