The Housing Moonshot
Fourth in a Series
I tied myself in a knot this week thinking about the housing crisis. There are numerous logical market-based quick fix solutions. Repurpose commercial office space. Repurpose closed military communities. But none of those solutions address the root of the problem. They don’t address the causes of the mismatch between the supply of and demand for affordable housing. Nor do they provide entry into the housing market for first time homebuyers to allow them the opportunity to build wealth through property ownership.
The deeper I dug into the housing crisis, the more I realized that it is not a standalone crisis. It is the visible manifestation of interconnected failures in mental health, transportation, education, housing finance, banking, zoning, immigration, and drug policies. Every proposed solution collides with another system operating under a different set of incentives, constraints, and political realities. There is no hub that connects the dots and proposes a coherent set of strategies that address the conditions that underlie our current homelessness and housing challenges.
Which is really what The Architecture of Competence has been about from the beginning.
At its core, the architecture of competence is about the operational art of getting things done. It’s the discipline of connecting tactical action to strategic outcomes under real-world conditions of friction, uncertainty, limited resources, politics, time, and human failure.
The government knows how to do this. They did it during the COVID-19 pandemic with Operation Warp Speed. The government was the capital allocator, the synthesis hub, the logistician that shrunk a 70 month vaccine development timeline into 11 months. They allocated capital to Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson while ensuring that information was shared across all the organizations. They secured personal protective equipment and mobilized the nation’s manufacturing base to fill gaps in interrupted, broken, and vulnerable supply chains.
That architecture is the missing piece in developing coherent strategies that address the housing crisis. Addressing housing without addressing minimum livable wages, public transportation, education, narcotics policy, immigration, and veterans treatment is the equivalent of treating covid by handing out hand sanitizer and masks without investing in the vaccine capable of stopping the spread of the virus.
According to a 2024 Harvard study, more than 770,000 people experienced homelessness, the highest number ever recorded. This was an 18% increase over the prior year. That number is a floor, not a ceiling. The unhoused are the most visible victims. Behind them sit 22.7 million renter households who spend more than 30% of their take home pay on housing, a record high for the fourth consecutive year. Behind them come another 8.5 million households that are severely cost-burdened or living in substandard housing. 150,000 of the unhoused are children, a 33% increase over the prior year, the largest single year increase of any population group. A child experiencing housing instability will be more likely to experience health challenges, emotional distress, and fall behind academically.
These are not housing statistics. They are the measurable human fallout of systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The path into homelessness is rarely a straight line. It runs through failed handoffs between mental health, substance abuse, employment, veterans services, immigration, and housing. Nobody owns the intersection. Nobody is responsible for catching people before they pitch a tent under a highway underpass in Los Angeles or Houston.
The North Star is an adequate supply of housing inventory at all income levels with safety nets to catch the people who, for whatever reason, fall through the cracks. The safety net isn’t an apartment alone. It’s a network of services that address domestic abuse, substance abuse, and PTSD among others.
The Hub is the engine for synthesis of data. In this model the federal government is a resource allocator and data collector that creates the incentives for the private sector to invest in low income housing. These incentives could come in the form of loan guarantees, tax breaks, and logistics. The government must use their massive purchasing power to drive down costs, speed zoning decisions and permitting processes to get inventory into the system.
The Hub’s first step is a joint interagency task force between HUD, HHS, ICE, DEA, and transportation among others to better understand the root causes of homelessness and target neighborhoods where low income housing is most needed.
The Hub without a clearly defined clock and scoreboard is just another committee. A Hub without a throttle to accelerate programs that work and kill programs that don’t is just another failed bureaucracy. The architecture of competence requires the North Star, Hub, Clock, Scoreboard, and Throttle to be deployed and coordinated by leaders committed to rigorous analysis and disciplined execution.
The clock is running. Homelessness increased 18% in a single year. Child homelessness increased 33%. These are not gradual trends. They are acceleration signals. The scoreboard has to reflect that urgency. Success isn’t measured in housing starts, loan guarantees issued, or task forces convened. It is measured in households stabilized, cost burden reduced, children housed, and veterans off the street. If the programs aren’t moving those numbers they get killed and the capital gets redeployed.
The solution isn’t a single policy. And it isn’t a massive public bureaucracy. There isn’t one single silver bullet solution that will put an end to the housing crisis. The solution is integrated policy that leverages both public and private resources. A policy that addresses supply and demand imbalance, supports pathways to living wage employment, and provides access to shoulder services that address the underlying factors that contribute to chronic housing challenges.
We have seen public private partnerships before and we have also seen the consequences when oversight slips. The XVIII Airborne corps are great war fighters but rotten landlords. The military tried something similar when it turned to private builders to update and manage badly outdated housing stock. Companies like Hunt Military Communities have built and maintained housing at bases across the country. They do it profitably while providing better housing for our servicemen and women and their families. Was it a perfect experiment? No, there were acknowledged maintenance issues across the privatized inventory of military housing. Improved supervision has rectified the most severe of the problems and provided the oversight necessary to maintain satisfactory standards for our service members and their families.
The model for this integrated approach already exists at a smaller scale. Veterans Community Project operates tiny home villages in five states with an 85% success rate among participants receiving on-site case management and support services. In Seattle, the Low Income Housing Institute’s tiny home villages moved nearly 50% of residents into permanent housing, outperforming traditional congregate shelters by a significant margin. The common denominator isn’t the size of the unit. It’s the wraparound service network attached to it. Stable shelter plus mental health support, substance abuse treatment, and employment services breaks the cycle. Shelter alone manages it.
We’re not going to solve intractable problems generations in the making overnight. We can, however, build a mechanism to invest, evaluate, iterate, and accelerate investment in programs that work and kill those that do not.
Solving the housing crisis in this country isn’t a single moonshot. It’s building the architecture for a space station on the moon with all of the support structures that ensure the inhabitants thrive.