How housing victories in San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta could spread nationwide
How housing victories in San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta could spread nationwide
As rents and homelessness climbed in San Diego over the last decade, leaders watched in frustration as affordable housing projects took months to get approved. The longer a project dragged on, the more expensive it became.
Housing in America is notoriously slow and complicated to build, so San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria decided to use one lever he had available. In January 2023, he signed an executive order to speed up project approvals, so every fully affordable project now had to be reviewed in 30 business days or less.
To meet this new goal, San Diego had to overhaul how it had been handling permitting. The city streamlined work that had been spread across multiple departments and filled positions it had budgeted for but left vacant. Within a year, fully affordable projects were clearing review in nine days on average. Citywide, 2023 marked San Diego’s biggest year for housing permits since at least 2005, with 9,691 homes approved, or an 82 percent jump from the year before.
Key takeaways
- Bloomberg Philanthropies is funding up to 30 cities to copy housing fixes that worked in San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta.
- The bet is that cities lack the know-how to execute good ideas, not the ideas themselves.
- It’s not clear what will happen to city capacity when the foundation funding runs out.
Austin, Texas embraced a different approach to tackling its housing shortage. After years of local zoning reform, the city legalized up to three homes on most single-family lots in late 2023, then cut the minimum lot size from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 in 2024. Those changes made it easier to add homes, including backyard accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and followed a broader construction boom that has helped bring rents down. Austin, which was becoming increasingly unaffordable, is now one of the few major American cities where asking rents have fallen since the pandemic.
Atlanta adopted a third housing strategy that didn’t require changing any laws at all. Mayor Andre Dickens rallied the heads of every public agency that affects housing, from the city’s housing authority and school system to the transit agency and land bank, and convened them in one room on a regular basis. He called it a “housing strike force” and it has helped advance the city’s broader effort to build or preserve 20,000 affordable homes by 2030. Every housing deal now comes to the mayor’s office, Dickens told me, and “I just start pushing buttons to push them out the door.”
Seen as a nationwide issue, the housing shortage is an enormously difficult problem, sitting at the nexus of the economy, the financial system, and decades of local zoning decisions. But the fixes don’t all have to be complex. A mayor can do all three of these — faster permitting, ADUs, a housing strike team — without waiting on Congress or their state legislature to act. And now one major nonprofit is betting that other cities could adopt them too.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg Philanthropies is announcing that it will fund up to 30 cities to adopt one of those three housing ideas. Each will get between $450,000 and $750,000 directly and two years of help from Accelerator for America and the digital consultancy Public Digital, also funded by Bloomberg. The philanthropy has already selected the first 15 cities, including Albuquerque, Chattanooga, Cleveland, Durham, Louisville, Miami, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and San Jose.
By housing construction standards, the money doesn’t go very far. The grants are geared toward hiring city staff, buying new software, and helping cities quickly develop the expertise that let San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta do what they did.
“You don’t need everyone to be innovating everything all the time when there are good ideas in the world that are working,” said James Anderson, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ government innovation program. “They need help adapting those ideas to local contexts.”
According to Anderson, the cities were chosen because their mayors had already taken hard political votes on zoning, and wanted help now to do more. Their timing is also intentional. On the federal level, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law in July, and it creates competitive grants for cities that modernize their permitting, for preapproved housing plans, and that open up their public land. These are the same reforms Bloomberg is now funding, and cities that can show they’ve already done work around it will be better positioned to tap into new federal dollars.
Mayors say they’ve seen big federal programs pass before and then found that actually leveraging those new funding streams in practice can be quite difficult. “We saw that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told me. “Even some of the aspects of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there was a lot of red tape to get some of that stuff across the finish line.”
The Bloomberg bet is that figuring out what to do isn’t as hard as organizing the knowledge of how to do it. The philanthropy thinks that with enough money and hand-holding, good ideas can spread.
It’s an experiment worth testing, but even at the outset there are real limits to what kind of help a short-term infusion of cash can do in practice. San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta all had substantial housing staff in place before they started, and many cities don’t have the same depth to draw on. A two-year grant covers a few staff roles, but doesn’t guarantee they’ll stay long-term in a city where most of the local budget is already committed.
What a “housing strike force” actually is
Dickens had campaigned for office in Atlanta on building 20,000 affordable units in eight years. When he became mayor in 2022, his staff told him the city was on pace to fall 4,000 to 5,000 units short of this goal, and that the main federal subsidy for affordable housing, which gets rationed out by the state in fixed amounts each year, wasn’t going to make up the difference.
What Atlanta did have was land, spread across more than a dozen public entities, each with its own board and its own ideas about what the land was for. One 10-acre city site just northwest of downtown was being used to store trash cans before delivery to residents. “It’s not the highest and best use of the land, but we’ve been doing it for decades,” Josh Humphries, then Dickens’ senior housing adviser, told The Guardian.
So Dickens pulled the heads of those agencies into one body reporting through his chief housing officer. The transit system and school district both answer to their own boards, so his pitch was that they weren’t giving anything up by getting involved. “You are still in charge of your organization, these are your deals, but we are an accelerator,” Dickens told me.
They spent nothing setting it up and hired no new staff for the strike force itself — though when Dickens advises other mayors, he’s blunter about the pressure a mayor would need to exert in convening such a team. An agency that opts out of participating, he said, is “outside of the scope of the mayor’s vision” and “that’s not a safe place to be.”
“I didn’t need another task force,” Dickens added. “Task forces are good, but we know what we’re doing. We don’t have to describe the task. No, this is a strike force. We know the deals, we have the land, we know where the money is for most of these deals, and we have the political will.”
What Dickens did was create “a horizontal way of organizing otherwise vertical players,” as Anderson of Bloomberg Philanthropies put it.
As part of the strike force, agency leaders meet monthly, and quarterly with the mayor. Each one reports what they will produce in the next 30 days, whether that’s a signed agreement, bank financing, or a permit, in front of everyone else. The goal is to move everything as fast as possible to keep down costs.
“You’re in a meeting with 20 colleagues talking about your four or five projects, and everybody is aware of everybody’s projects,” Dickens said. “You don’t want to come back to that meeting saying nothing happened over the last 30 days.”
The limits of the model
Dickens was fairly blunt about where the model stops working. “It works best in cities that have a sizable amount of competent housing development people,” he told me. “A strike force is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You all are capable.” A city still standing up its housing program, he added, should just focus on collaboration, because it would be hard for a small city without “the knowledgeable skills, the capacity” to operate like this.
Most cities can’t easily build that internal bench. Local governments pay less than state or federal employers for the same specialized work, and between half and three-quarters of a typical city’s operating budget is already locked up in salaries, pensions, debt payments, and basic services before the mayor makes a single discretionary call.
In Cleveland, they’re hoping to use the Bloomberg funding to bring in some new support. “Right now it’s a capacity game for us,” Bibb told me. “IT staff, planning staff, development staff, the list goes on. Policy staff as well.”
Cleveland also faces different challenges than Atlanta, which built its strike force for a growth market that already had projects lined up. Cleveland is an older, industrial city with an aging housing stock and a population that has only recently stopped shrinking, so Bibb needs code enforcement and rehab as well as new units. He plans to point the strike force first at a housing innovation district he launched earlier this year, an area spanning parts of three East Side neighborhoods where the city has concentrated its financing and permitting reforms.
Two-year grants can generally be a challenge for cities. Philanthropy often pays for staff long enough to prove a policy works, but when the foundation money goes away, cities can struggle to find the dollars to keep the positions going. While Atlanta’s strike force was organizing around people the city already employed, Cleveland’s will require new ongoing resources for a growing payroll.
Asked what happens when the money runs out, Bibb maintained he’s concentrating on the near term. “Right now we’re just focused on securing the grant, getting the team in place, and really seeing some positive results with the strike force team in our housing innovation district,” he said.
Can a good idea be scaled?
The 30 cities won’t be working alone. Bloomberg is running them as a cohort, meaning each city will pair with the city that pioneered the idea. The goal is to trade advice, mentorship, and opportunities for city leaders to visit and tour. Cleveland is one of roughly 10 cities that will take up the strike force model, meaning Bibb’s team will work with Dickens and his staff.
“One of the major reasons that good ideas do not spread is a lack of clarity around what it took in the original city to get the hard work done,” Anderson said. Adopting cities need to hear from the originals on both a political and a technical level, he told me, to understand “the trade-offs, the costs, the errors, and lessons learned” before they start.
Bloomberg has been testing a version of this model since 2024 through its Idea Exchange, which now includes more than 1,000 cities across 95 countries and has nearly 200 policy replications completed or underway.
Within two years, cities pursuing permitting reform are expected to cut their housing approval timelines in half, those pursuing ADUs to double their pipelines, and participants ultimately to post gains in citywide housing supply.
The housing shortage runs into millions of homes, and these proposed strategies don’t touch challenges like interest rates or the price of lumber. But across the country, they could show how quickly a good idea can spread.
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