Federal Reforms to Strengthen Housing Stability, Affordability, and Choice: Opportunity for All Housing Policy Brief

Among the many pressing issues for the Biden administration to tackle are the challenges of instituting national housing policies that address housing stability and affordability and that ensure affordable housing is built and preserved in neighborhoods of opportunity. These challenges are not new, and some issues, particularly for renters and communities of color, have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this brief, we present the results of a scan of housing policy platforms from organizations that represent a range of ideological perspectives for federal policy proposals to improve housing stability, affordability, and choice. We identify federal reforms that meet the following criteria: (1) they have some empirical basis to suggest they could be effective at advancing these goals; (2) they appear in more than one published housing policy platform; and (3) they were prioritized by housing experts we engaged in the Opportunity for All workshop series. In this brief, we discuss each of the proposed federal policy reforms and their evidence base, and explore considerations for federal policymakers when implementing the reforms.