This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.
The housing crisis demands urgent action, but philanthropy’s obsession with rapid national deployment may be undermining the solutions we need most. We know there are no silver bullet solutions, yet many funders still seek silver bullet results: rapid scale, immediate return on investment, and national reach.
Today’s most transformative housing innovations are often born from regional experimentation. Their strength lies not in speed, but in strategic growth—rooted in local context, adaptable, and built to last. What if we redefined scale as the ability to deliver consistent, resilient impact within a region—to weather volatility, serve communities over time, and build models others can learn from, rather than replicate wholesale?
From my own time in philanthropy, I’ve come to realize that the way we talk about scale can sometimes work against the very impact we hope to achieve. Too often, the sector’s fixation on rapid growth pushes organizations to expand before they’re ready, undermining their long-term potential. What if instead of chasing scale for a single organization, we focused on replication, shared learning, and strengthening networks? By reducing information gaps and removing the pressure for organizations to expand beyond their capacity, and instead investing in collaboration and collective action, the results can be more innovative, impactful, and enduring.
The housing crisis is complex and multifaceted. It demands a constellation of solutions—not something one-size-fits-all—that can adapt to regional markets while sharing core innovations. Below are some examples of what happens when we embrace patient regional innovation over immediate national ambition.
Protecting Main Street from Wall Street
In recent years, corporate ownership has been on the rise in the multifamily housing market, with the potential to reshape the landscape for tenants and smaller landlords alike. These investors often see “value-add” opportunities in acquiring older or lower-rent buildings, making cosmetic upgrades, and repositioning them for higher-income tenants—a process that frequently results in the displacement of existing residents. Small multifamily properties, in particular, have long served as both a source of naturally occurring affordable housing and a pathway to wealth for mom-and-pop owners. During the COVID-19 pandemic, missed rent payments put many of these small landlords at risk of falling behind on mortgages, forcing some to sell under pressure—opening the door wider to Wall Street buyers. Mom-and-pop landlords, often operating with smaller margins and older buildings, can’t compete with institutional owners who operate at scale, make quick capital improvements, and raise rents more frequently, often displacing existing residents.
The Local Rental Owner Collaboration (LROC) in Los Angeles was designed to meet the moment by both addressing the immediate COVID impact while also building a long-term model. The program focused on helping small-scale landlords access institutional-level benefits while maintaining below-market rents. It offered rental relief, subsidized maintenance, energy retrofits, and tenant services—essentially creating a support system that lets small landlords maintain their buildings and generate greater profit without displacing their tenants. The pilot relied on collaboration between a local nonprofit, Coalition for Responsible Community Development, and a national community development financial institution, Enterprise Community Partners, blending deep local knowledge with scalable practices to ensure culturally responsive implementation and broader replicability.
Four years later, LROC exceeded its pilot goals: It supported 300 naturally occurring affordable rentals owned by 52 individual owners with zero evictions. Rather than forcing a premature national expansion, Enterprise Community Partners is thoughtfully adapting LROC strategies to communities in Chicago, New York City, Atlanta, and Hawaii. Each location can tailor the model to local market conditions and regulatory environments.
This replication approach mirrors how Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), which are typically managed by nonprofits and use special tax assessments to fund supplemental municipal services, spread across the country. As of 2018 there were over 1,000 BIDs nationwide, and they exist in nearly every major city. Each BID adapts the core model to local conditions, governance structures, and community needs. Like BIDs, LROC succeeds through a combination of centralized expertise and regional customization. The financing mechanisms, tenant service models, and landlord engagement strategies can be systematized and shared across locations, while implementation adapts to regional market dynamics and regulation.
Building Wealth Without Pushing People Out
Gentrification can force established residents to shoulder the burdens of economic development without reaping the economic benefits. As wealthy newcomers bid up housing costs, longtime residents, particularly renters, face displacement just as their neighborhoods become more desirable.
The Trust Neighborhoods nonprofit has developed an innovative response through mixed-income neighborhood trusts (MINTs). These organizations acquire, renovate, and build portfolios of rental properties in gentrifying areas, and their mission, legal structure, and governance are shaped by residents and community organizations. By combining grassroots organizing with flexible financing, MINTs help residents control neighborhood improvements while maintaining housing security.
The model’s genius lies in capturing rising property values to permanently fund affordable housing. Rather than fighting gentrification, MINTs harness its economic forces for community benefit. Trust Neighborhoods now operates five MINTs, owns 250 homes, and has deployed more than $70 million in capital benefiting over 450 residents.
“The genius lies in capturing rising property values to permanently fund affordable housing.”
The Trust Neighborhoods model demonstrates the potential for franchising community-controlled housing. Like other successful franchise operations, each MINT maintains deep local relationships and responds to neighborhood-specific conditions while benefiting from centralized expertise in legal structures, financing mechanisms, and operational systems. This franchising approach scales the institutional knowledge and financial tools while keeping control hyperlocal. It takes the more established concept of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and makes it local, centering governance and control within the neighborhood but sharing infrastructure for accessing capital, navigating regulations, and supporting community organizing capacity.
Unlocking Land from Schools and Faith Communities
A lack of affordable housing is a significant barrier to attracting and retaining educators, contributing to teacher shortages nationwide. Rather than waiting for broad housing policy reforms, Local Educational Agencies in California are building education workforce housing directly on underdeveloped land they already own.
A collaboration between the California School Board Association, UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools and Terner Center for Housing Innovation, and UCLA’s CityLab created a comprehensive inventory of surplus school land, documenting more than 150,000 acres across 7,068 properties statewide. This research supported policy changes like AB 2295, which cleared regulatory barriers for construction. The team’s recent report documents learnings from nine early adopter school districts that have built housing to share what worked and identify pain points to help streamline future efforts to expand housing options on school-owned lands.
This approach demonstrates how a centralized, comprehensive inventory can support local partnerships to turn information into action. Each school district can now assess its own land assets and pursue development suited to its specific community needs and regulatory environment. Additionally, aggregating demand across districts can unlock economies of scale wherein more production helps lower costs and presents a more comprehensive view of development potential, which could make it easier to attract government investment than a piecemeal project-by-project approach. Similarly, California’s faith communities own more than 170,000 acres of unused land. Working with Firm Foundation Community Housing (FFCH), congregations are constructing dignified, factory-built tiny home villages to address homelessness. These projects complete construction in just two to three months and have delivered 55 projects encompassing 533 homes, with additional projects underway.
FFCH’s model works because they bridge local bureaucracy and the unique values of faith communities. By building deep trust, they’ve established a track record that supports long-term growth.
“This model works by bridging local bureaucracy and the unique values of faith communities. By building deep trust, they’ve established a track record that supports long-term growth.”
While this work can be slow to start, its momentum builds with each completed project. Rather than prioritizing speed, funders and partners would do better to focus on what truly drives impact: centering communities, maintaining cost controls, and aggregating data to tell a fuller, more meaningful story.
The Matrix of Central Innovation and Regional Adaptation
These examples begin with homegrown innovations that emerge from specific regional contexts and community needs. They develop systematic approaches to common challenges while maintaining flexibility for regional adaptation. They build on existing assets and institutions rather than creating parallel systems. Most importantly, they solve specific problems before attempting to scale, creating proven models worth replicating. The path forward lies in strategic replication through what we might call a “matrix model”—centralizing certain innovations while decentralizing implementation.
This matrix approach scales the institutional knowledge and operational infrastructure that communities need most: legal frameworks, financing mechanisms, policy advocacy strategies, and technical assistance systems. Meanwhile, community engagement, governance structures, and program priorities remain responsive to regional contexts and community leadership.
Philanthropy’s role should be serving as the connective tissue for this matrix infrastructure. This means identifying patterns across regional innovations, helping connect the dots to extract elements that work centrally and could be useful everywhere, then zooming back in to invest in thoughtful regional adaptation. Rather than picking winners early or imposing artificial timelines for national expansion, funders can become the support system that facilitates this matrix.
This requires fundamentally rethinking grantmaking timelines and structures. One- or two-year grants are insufficient to accelerate sustainable innovation or create lasting change. What if funders could make longer-term commitments at meaningful scale—say, $3 million over five years as a baseline—and then incentivize organizations by offering additional funding year-over-year if they demonstrate their model is working? Organizations would know they have sustainable baseline funding to develop and refine their models, while also having incentives to maximize effectiveness within that five-year timespan. This creates space for the patient regional innovation and strategic replication that sustainable housing solutions require.
To meet the scale of our housing challenges, we need to shift from chasing silver bullets to cultivating a resilient ecosystem—one that supports innovation through sustained investment, shared learning, and grounded regional action. The question is not whether these models can go national, but whether we can build the infrastructure and funding systems that allow them to thrive where they are and inspire new possibilities elsewhere. That’s the kind of scale that lasts.
Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.