This second brief of our larger Nashville Summit report series highlights the barriers and solutions that came up across multiple conversations via the dialogue tables. These are items that cut across housing, workforce and/or small business development and are opportunities for the community development movement to come together to advocate for changes that will benefit all of us.
Devin Thompson, Director, Health Equity and Impact
Key Takeaways
1
Organizations that are able to move from a siloed competition model to a collaborative service provision approach will make more efficient use of the limited resources in the new funding environment.
2
Delays created by layers of process are making community development activities not just more costly, but less impactful. This actively filters out local players and preserves a status quo that only services the largest and most well capitalized firms.
3
Our systems are designed in a manner that inherently leads to fragmentation, which has a real human cost to residents. Our human service systems need to transition to a “no-wrong-door” ecosystem where data is shared, roles are specialized and handoffs are seamless.
4
Broadening our partners in the movement for a just economy requires pairing moral arguments with hard evidence. When we pair a human narrative with quantitative economic consequences, we are better equipped to shift the conversation.
Setting the Agenda
Before asking participants to propose solutions towards dismantling the systemic barriers in their local communities, they needed to start with a shared understanding of the set of problems they were going to be navigating together.
The Nashville Summit began with the Setting the Stage panel, moderated by NCRC’s President and CEO Jesse Van Tol. We brought together national leaders Priya Jayachandran (National Housing Trust), Brooke DeRenzis (National Skills Coalition), Nicole Elam (National Bankers Association) and Jonathan Brereton (Scale Link) to deliver a sober assessment of the systemic barriers in the community development landscape.
Their consensus was that the field is not facing a temporary funding dip, but a permanent systemic shift. The New Normal will be defined by scarcity, but its secondary impacts are even more dangerous: delays in public processes, a collapse in political will for complex projects and a retreat by risk-averse private lenders.
The panel identified three specific fractures in the national foundation:
- The Operational Crisis in Housing: Priya Jayachandran noted that while housing is enjoying a political moment, the actual operation of housing is breaking down. Cuts to foundational programs like HOME and Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) are compounding with a massive rental assistance gap where only one in four qualified Americans can access help. This leaves tenants struggling to pay their rent and owners unable to reinvest in their rental properties, accelerating a cycle of disrepair.
- The Unfunded Mandate in Workforce: Brooke DeRenzis highlighted that while the administration is pushing new workforce policies, they are often implemented without the financial backing for wraparound services, most notably for transportation and childcare assistance that allows working people to actually finish training. She emphasized that this disproportionately hurts the 20% of the workforce composed of immigrants, turning the potential economic strength provided by a vital and engaged group of prospective employees into a vulnerability.
- The Backlash Against Capital Institutions: Nicole Elam and Jonathan Brereton described a hostile environment for mission-driven banks. After seeing 88% asset growth during the post-2020 era, Minority Depository Institutions have become targets, facing a loss of capital, contracts and certifications. Simultaneously, the economics of small-dollar lending (loans under $$100,000) have collapsed under high interest rates and inflation, forcing CDFIs to hunker down and restrict lending to protect their balance sheets at a time when entrepreneurs need funding most.
The panel offered a critical strategic reality to the room: Siloed organizations will not survive this shift.
- Nicole Elam urged lenders to stop waiting to be asked into deals and instead embed themselves early by leveraging fintech partnerships and secondary markets.
- Jonathan Brereton argued for radical collaboration, such as pooling data among CDFIs to create normalized credit risk scores that could drastically lower the cost of origination.
- Jesse Van Tol closed by reminding the room that while we cannot immediately solve the funding crisis, we can control the chaos by building collective power.
This context served as the prompt for the afternoon dialogues. We asked the room: If this is the national reality, what does it look like when it hits your zip code?
Common Themes
Across our eighteen dialogue tables spanning the housing, workforce development and small business ecosystems, we expected to hear very different complaints. But, as we analyzed the eighty hours of transcripts, a striking pattern emerged. While the technical details differed, many of the structural fractures were identical. Seven specific barriers were mentioned at nearly every table regardless of the sector. These are not merely housing problems or small business problems. They are systemic failures that cut across the entire community development ecosystem:
1. Capital Scarcity and Unreliability
The most immediate pain point is money, and more specifically, the nature of the money. It isn’t just that funding is scarce; it is that it has become volatile. Participants described an environment of extreme uncertainty where organizations feel they “can’t count on anything,” leading to diminished capacity and rising risks across sectors. The additional areas of concern expressed are as follows:
- Federal Instability: The instability of government funding is creating a “stop-start” dynamic that makes long-term planning impossible. Core programs like HOME and CDBG that have historically been the community development backbone for cities are facing drastic cuts. In one region, a state legislature’s decreased funding to the housing fund set a detrimental precedent, jeopardizing projects overnight.
- The MDI and CDFI Squeeze: Targeted funding for Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) and community development financial institutions (CDFIs) is also under pressure. Despite serving the most marginalized populations, these institutions are facing denial of certifications and a loss of contracts. Simultaneously, the economics of small-dollar lending (loans under $100,000) have collapsed. Delinquency rates for small business loans are rising to levels mirroring the Great Recession, forcing CDFIs to hunker down by laying off staff and restricting lending to protect their assets.
- Private Sector Retreat: Private capital is also retreating. In some regions, a collapse in the tax credit market resulted in nearly nine out of ten affordable housing projects losing funding. Even when heavy subsidies are involved, organizations in markets like Denver reported having to “beg” lenders for appropriate pricing due to risk aversion.
- The Philanthropic Pause: Even typically stable philanthropic sources are showing signs of contraction. Some foundations are holding back funds to see what entities will survive this crisis, while others are shifting strategies to safeguard against political backlash targeting DEI programs. This hesitation leaves innovative, but capacity-constrained, nonprofits unable to pivot.
2. Bureaucracy and Outdated Policy
Across the board, the discussions revealed a system where process has begun to cannibalize purpose. The sheer friction of navigating the bureaucratic red tape of local government has become a primary driver of inequity. It filters out the smaller, community-based players who lack the capital, leaving only the largest, well-capitalized developers and contractors able to survive the gauntlet. This “paper wall” slows progress and actively preserves the status quo by pricing out the very innovation and diversity that cities claim to want. Participants detailed exactly how this execution risk manifests:
- The Time Cost: Bureaucratic friction is acting as a massive, invisible tax on development and growth. For housing developers, delays in city-level plan reviews and complex permitting processes destroy financial viability, with the permitting process alone dragging on for 12 to 18 months. This same dynamic cripples small business contractors through delayed payments. Vendors are often forced to wait up to six months for government checks that are contractually due in 90 days. This lag time effectively forces small businesses to finance the government’s cash flow, carrying debt to cover payroll and preventing them from bidding on new jobs.
- The Structural Lockout: Procurement design often excludes small vendors and Minority and Woman-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs) inadvertently because of how they’re designed. Government contract margins are frequently bid down until they’re so thin that only large general contractors, who can manage multiple concurrent government contracts, can afford to compete. Outdated bonding and insurance requirements further harden this barrier, making participation prohibitively difficult for small firms.
- Resource Rigidity: Even available resources are rarely maximized due to lack of flexibility. Participants pointed to missed opportunities in best utilizing state and federal funds, such as using Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS dollars as standard rent subsidies rather than leveraging them as upfront equity for long-term restricted units, a shift that would make development more viable.
3. The Silo Effect
We talk constantly about holistic community development, while our systems were designed to force fragmentation. The result is a choppy system where individuals facing one struggle, such as housing instability, are likely wrestling with healthcare and employment issues simultaneously, but the organizations serving them operate in total isolation. Other tangible impacts of these silos that participants spoke of are as follows:
- The Runaround: A resident with multiple needs often has to visit different agencies that do not speak to one another. There is no warm handoff, only a restart. This disconnection is especially devastating for vulnerable populations, such as those experiencing homelessness, who must navigate restrictive criteria across multiple siloed agencies just to access basic shelter. Effective workforce development, for instance, requires coordinating childcare and transportation, services that often fall outside standard Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding structures.
- The Turf War: Fragmentation is frequently driven by competition and organizational self-interest. Funding structures inadvertently create a winners and losers model, forcing organizations to compete for the same limited pool of dollars and hoard clients to protect their grant metrics. This leads to severe duplication in some areas and total deserts in others. During a panel, Nate Hogan provided an example from Charlotte where an analysis revealed 17 different organizations offering the same mentoring services to businesses with under $250,000 in revenue, diluting the impact of philanthropic investment in the area. Conversely, this competitive mindset means that when organizations face funding cuts, they retreat rather than merge. We are seeing this with Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs), which are responding to losses by shrinking and laying off staff rather than consolidating, effectively dismantling infrastructure that took decades to build.
4. Trapped by Capacity & Scale
Organizations are being forced to shoulder greater demands with diminishing resources, creating a trap that threatens their fundamental viability. The nonprofit sector is used to doing more with less, but now scale has become a structural limit on their ability to survive.
- The Brain Drain: The sector is grappling with a severe talent crisis. The departure of seasoned leaders means decades of institutional knowledge vanishes overnight. One participant noted that CEOs are stepping down at an alarming rate and “no one wants the job” because the responsibilities have become overwhelming. This is further compounded by high turnover among younger staff (the average tenure for Millennials is cited at just 19 months) leaving organizations constantly retraining new hires rather than leveraging those hires to execute on their mission.
- The Scale Trap: Small organizations are caught in a funding catch-22. They lack the upfront capital to hire specialized staff (like grant writers or technical experts) needed to scale, but they cannot secure that capital because they haven’t yet scaled. They are trapped between demand and capacity limitations. This is exacerbated by the “skeleton crew” dynamic, where organizations built for incremental change are forced to rapidly staff up for sudden, massive funding injections only to face the exhaustion of scaling back down when the money disappears.
- The Administrative Burden: Mission-driven leaders are spending more time on survival tasks rather than strategic growth. The cost of administering small grants often outweighs the value received, with detailed quarterly reporting requirements creating busy work for staff who could be serving communities more directly. This lack of unrestricted funds means that capacity-building efforts like technology upgrades or strategic planning are the first things cut, trapping organizations in a cycle of inefficiency and preventing them from pivoting to meet new challenges.
5. Risk and Logic Mismatch
The community development finance system is applying the wrong measuring stick to community investments, utilizing frameworks ill-suited for mission-driven work and effectively penalizing organizations that serve marginalized communities. Two major impacts of this mismatch were also named:
- The Square Peg: The core of this barrier is the application of speculative commercial risk logic to community development, ignoring the intrinsic stability of these markets. In affordable housing, regulators treat projects with mile-long waiting lists where lease-up risk is effectively non-existent with the same caution as speculative commercial real estate deals. In other cases, banks often fail to distinguish between asset classes. One participant noted that a LIHTC project in Buffalo is viewed with the same risk profile as a speculative condo in Miami. This logic extends to loan underwriting as well, where MDIs and CDFIs are serving Black, Brown or woman entrepreneurs often denied by traditional lenders regardless of the borrower’s actual income or performance history.
- The Penalty: This mismatch results in a punitive structure where doing the “right” work costs more. CDFIs frequently pay higher rates for their capital than traditional banks, meaning money becomes more expensive when it flows through the very institutions designed to help those least positioned to pay higher interest rates. Furthermore, safeness and soundness regulations often cap the equity banks can commit to affordable housing, while the economics of small-dollar lending (loans under $100,000) force CDFIs to rely on subsidies just to avoid charging rates that would sink the deal.
6. Misaligned Economic Incentives
The fact that the system is rigged to penalize progress was perhaps the most frustrating barrier cited. Structural disincentives effectively discourage economic mobility by punishing individuals who successfully increase their income. The following are the most devastating impacts of these ongoing structural disincentives:
- The Benefits Cliff: In both housing and workforce development discussions, participants railed against the common occurrence when an individual’s marginal increase in income forces them to immediately lose a disproportionate amount of essential subsidized services, such as Medicaid, childcare benefits or housing vouchers. This creates a rational trap where families are forced to make terrible choices, such as turning down a promotion or a better apartment, to preserve their safety net. In Nashville, for instance, a single mother with two children sees virtually no difference in actual resources between earning $17,000 and $48,000 annually. This misaligned incentive fosters dependency, convincing workers they are better off staying put because the cost of losing assistance outweighs the value of pay raises.
- The Metric Trap: In workforce development, the pressure to prioritize immediate job placement success driven by rigid grant deliverables forces organizations to pursue short-term, transactional goals. This creates a conflict between satisfying the employer’s need for a warm body and the employee’s need for a career path. To meet reporting requirements, organizations often place individuals in low-wage, entry-level jobs with little room for advancement, effectively neglecting those with the highest barriers to employment who require longer, more intensive support. This short-sightedness traps workers in a cycle of stagnant wages and undermines the fundamental goal of moving people toward true independence.
7. The Climate of Fear
Finally, we cannot ignore the role our current political reality has played in stoking fear across the ecosystem. The participants detail a palpable “climate of fear” resulting from a politically volatile and often hostile operating environment. This goes beyond simple underfunding issues but also signals an environment of ambiguity that paralyzes organizations dedicated to equity:
- The Hostility: The political landscape has shifted from “benign neglect” to active targeting. Programs focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts are under scrutiny, forcing organizations to scrub their websites of mission-critical language to avoid retaliatory action. This hostility extends to the criminalization of poverty, with measures like the felonizing of homeless encampments transforming homelessness from an economic problem into a criminal one. For immigrant communities, the climate is especially disruptive. ICE raids targeting Black and Brown immigrant neighborhoods have created a pervasive fear that keeps residents from going to work or sending children to school. Meanwhile, changes to federal guidelines threaten to exclude mixed-status families from Head Start and health services, pushing Latino entrepreneurs underground and forcing them to operate unregulated in the informal economy.
- The Ambiguity: Organizations describe a state of “legislative whiplash,” where executive orders and proposals constantly threaten funding streams, forcing nonprofits to spend precious resources on defensive measures rather than strategic planning. There is profound uncertainty over which funds might be stalled or rescinded over issues like sanctuary city status. Consequently, philanthropies are hedging their bets, pulling back on support for DEI-oriented programs to protect their endowments. In Indigenous communities, this uncertainty is compounded by historical trauma where contracts are often the first things revoked during a crisis. Tribes face constant pressure to navigate complex lending programs based on shifting federal guidelines. In one stark example, an entire State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) program is currently at risk because a single typographical error in the legislative bill’s language could lead to the withdrawal of all federal funding, jeopardizing equity and asset development for an entire community.
Possible Solutions for Common Barriers
Once we had a shared understanding of what we were up against, we had to figure out ways to overcome it.
The Innovation and Collaboration panel featured Kay Bowers (New Level Community Development Corp), Michael Neal (Urban Institute), Matt Wiltshire (Pathway Lending), Kristen Baker (LISC) and Nate Hogan (CLT Alliance Foundation). They focused on strategies for Community Development Organizations (CDOs) to adapt to a new normal defined by funding scarcity and external pressures.
The panelists agreed that the old model of chasing new funds via old funding streams is no longer viable. Panelists shared that success now demands moving beyond transactional relationships towards building integrated systems that leverage every asset available.
The panel established four core principles essential for future collaborations:
- Move from Transactional to Transformational Partnerships: Organizations lose out when they treat their grantmakers like ATMs instead of treating them like co-investors. This means partnering with them to co-design solutions and jointly tackle underlying local barriers rather than just having them fund individual programs.
- Build Efficient Ecosystems: Our program participants would be better served by, and funders are beginning to demand, a “no-wrong-door” system to meet clients wherever they enter. CDOs must formalize clients handoffs and coordinate services so that support is seamless, rather than forcing residents to navigate a maze of siloed processes.
- Leverage All Forms of Capital: Money is scarce, but other assets are not. Effective collaboration requires utilizing political capital from business leaders, social capital from trusted institutions and intellectual capital from local experts to drive change.
- Use Shared Data to Build Trust: Data is the common language of collaboration. When partners agree on the scope of the problem and the return on investment (ROI), it cuts through skepticism and aligns diverse interests.
The panel provided concrete examples of what it could look like to operationalize these principles:
- Matt Wiltshire pointed to “enlightened self-interest” as a tool to engage with prospective partners. He explained how the Pathway Housing Fund in Nashville collaborates with churches to use their land for affordable housing, a solution that advances the mission of both the church and the housing fund.
- Kristen Baker demonstrated the value of the “unlikely ally.” She detailed how LISC Ohio partnered with the Business Roundtable to show elected officials that housing policy is actually economic policy.
- Nate Hogan challenged the room to look beyond the paperwork. He noted that while government contracts are desirable, they often act as barriers. His work with Scale Up CLT focuses on deep, trusting relationships that allow small businesses to navigate through structural hurdles.
This strategic framework set the ground rules for the participant discussions that followed. One of the guiding prompts that we asked the participants to hone in on was: If these are the principles of collaboration, how do you actually build the machinery to make them work?
Common Solutions Across Areas
Build and Fund Shared Services Infrastructures
Direct funding toward the core infrastructure of the community development ecosystem would reduce the massive administrative burden on individual organizations. Participants emphasized the need to shift from independent, duplicative operations toward coordinated capacity, including shared services and role specialization. Participants identified several high-impact areas where pooled resources could have outsized impact:
- Shift from Competition to Consolidation: The administrative burden of chasing grants is financially crushing nonprofits struggling with limited resources, emphasizing the importance of mergers or forming coalitions to apply for joint grants. This would allow organizations to demonstrate a unified purpose by securing larger pots of funding without losing their individual identities. Funders should support these transitions as necessary lifelines. Additionally, the sector needs to move toward common applications and reporting frameworks to reduce the compliance burden.
- Adopt Intermediary and Fiscal Agent Models: Beyond just applying together, organizations should generate revenue by acting as fund managers or fiscal agents for foundations and banks. By regranting large pools of capital to smaller partners, these intermediaries can capture a fee for service to cover their administrative costs. This creates a sustainable revenue stream while significantly reducing the compliance and reporting burden on smaller, community-based entities.
- Pool Operational Resources and Share Expertise: Small organizations often waste critical resources on completing administrative tasks. Funding should support shared back-office functions like HR and centralized technical assistance. Instead of every non-profit hiring their own expensive specialists, associations could provide access to a shared pool of high-level lawyers and accountants. This is particularly critical for high-touch services like microloans, where origination costs often exceed the value of the loan itself. Community Development Corporations (CDCs) should engage in bulk purchasing of high-cost items like construction materials to better leverage economies of scale.
- Establish Pre-Development Revolving Funds: Collaboration must extend to the balance sheet to more adequately manage financial risks. The ecosystem should establish more pre-development revolving funds, or secured bridge financing, capitalized by foundation grants or low-cost patient capital. This shared financial infrastructure would cover the high upfront soft costs related to housing. It would also reduce the effective costs of waiting for government reimbursement by smoothing cash flow through bridge loans against those commitments.
- Implement Shared Technology and Data Systems: Technology is too expensive to build in a silo. The Detroit Housing Network provides a strong model where housing counseling agencies use a shared Salesforce system to coordinate client relationship management. This shared infrastructure allows organizations to track data collectively and automate internal processes, such as borrower pre-qualification, effectively cutting loan approval times from months to days.
Formalize an Integrated "No-Wrong-Door" Ecosystem
Ensure formal, transparent handoffs between all support functions (i.e., lenders, social services, workforce development providers, etc.) through shared data systems. The intended outcome would be resources being efficiently allocated under a shared community plan, subsequently dismantling competitive silos. The transition to a connected system relies on implementing some of the recommendations participants raised:
- Build Connected Systems and Formalize Handoffs: Organizations must recognize that participants don’t live in silos and touch multiple service providers to meet their needs. Rather than asking them to start from scratch when they walk into a new agency, we need connected ecosystems. The McGruder Center created a single access point for human services where an intake person can take a holistic view of the participant and connect them to resources they might not know exist. Similarly, a food bank in Cleveland became an ecosystem hub by placing workforce development offices on site. This resulted in more than half of the food assistance recipients receiving additional services.
- Adopt Integrated Service Models: Sophisticated collaboration adopts multi-disciplinary approaches like the Cradle to Career concept, which aligns a variety of social services from early childhood education to financial literacy. To operationalize this, organizations should establish centralized hubs using existing community assets, such as grocery stores or community centers, to offer diverse services. This ensures that a resident visiting a location for one need can seamlessly access workforce development or financial coaching at the same location.
- Leverage Data for Referrals: Shared systems are foundational to building trust and aligning interests. Agencies can use shared CRM platforms to identify deep social determinants of health needs, such as food insecurity, that they cannot address alone. Because they cannot provide every service internally, they could use these shared systems to refer clients to partners who are experts in those areas.
- Dismantle Competitive Silos: The current system is “choppy” and fosters competition where organizations are incentivized to hoard clients to protect individual grant metrics. To fix this, handoffs and collaborations need to be formalized with clear, documented agreements that detail contributions and expectations. This moves the sector away from hoarding and toward a collaborative model where referrals are tracked and valued.
- Implement Community-Based Planning: True collaborative efforts must be led by a shared community plan where each organization has a clearly defined role. This moves organizations beyond focusing solely on their programs’ clients, and often conflicting, strategic plans. This strategic alignment also opens the door for organizations to apply for joint grants together, increasing their funding power.
Adopt Enterprise-Level Funding Models
Funders that force qualified, proven organizations to compete for resources are wasting their grantees’ efforts and should instead direct resources through reliable, enterprise-level models. Unrestricted commitments and philanthropic equity-like investments expand organizations’ ability to meet their mission. This trust-based philanthropy approach provides the large-scale stability necessary for CDOs to mitigate risk. Advocates pointed to several strategies to improve the movement of capital:
- Establish Qualification-Based Funding Queues: The current system forces organizations to compete for funding for every single project. This wastes time and money. Instead, funders should establish clear production criteria. If an organization meets those standards, they enter a funding queue. This proven approach, modeled after the NeighborWorks framework, ensures capital flows to those who have demonstrated they can execute. This shifts the focus to rewarding capacity and production rather than the quality of a single proposal. Given that this approach benefits larger players, established organizations must also be used to help bring smaller, emerging organizations along.
- Shift to General Operating Support: Organizations often find themselves in a position where they never have enough staff and money at the same time. Funders traditionally underwrite specific programs but undervalue the costs of the business structure surrounding them. This forces nonprofits to chase small, restricted grants that are often not worth the administrative effort. The ecosystem must pivot to multi-year, unrestricted commitments. Philadelphia provides a strong example where advocates secured $3.5 million in the city budget specifically for general operating support for CDCs. This financial padding provides organizations the stability needed to weather economic shifts.
- Implement Trust-Based Philanthropy: During the pandemic, many funders loosened restrictions and prioritized keeping nonprofits open. This trust-based approach needs to become the standard. Financial partners should commit to multi-year funding streams that allow organizations to plan and execute for the years ahead. Organizations should also feel empowered to negotiate. They can ask funders to rework existing grants for flexibility or simply turn down grants that demand unsustainable programmatic outputs without covering operational costs.
- Build Permanent Capital and Endowments: The ultimate goal is to move beyond the yearly fundraising cycle entirely. Strategies should include raising enough capital to create endowments where interest and dividends support the mission in perpetuity. This shifts the focus from survival to generational impact.
Integrate Policy Advocacy and Education Efforts
Focusing on political and policy advocacy will allow the movement to address underlying structural issues rather than endless studies. Building the will to overcome local political inertia could lead to updates of outdated regulations that currently block capital and progress. We can achieve greater scale and legislative influence by prioritizing these collective advocacy actions:
- Fund Continuous Research and Policy Advocacy: There is a significant power imbalance when large providers can afford lobbyists and small community groups cannot. Coming together and advocating through a community development industry group or association would ensure the entire ecosystem’s interests are advocated for at the legislative level. This includes funding tools like the data portals seen in the Illinois State CRA implementation process that train community groups to use data to tell their story effectively. Organizations like Global Detroit have also dedicated resources to validating the effectiveness of their local community development ecosystem — work that is essential for long-term sector growth yet rarely funded by programmatic grants.
- Educate Political Leaders on Community Development Fundamentals: There is a massive knowledge gap among governmental leaders regarding basic community finance. Simultaneously, community leaders often lack a strong understanding of how mortgages and debt leverage work in community development. One participant noted that educating a single neighborhood leader took years but was an essential step for changing their community. Similarly, local officials and community advocates often lack understanding of how housing economics intersect with municipal budgets, and too often community advocates simply do not know how government budgets work. Advocates must close this gap by bringing data directly to policymakers to show that enabling significant expansion of diverse housing benefits the broader economy.
- Advocate for Policy Reform and Against Barriers: Continuous engagement is necessary to remove outdated regulations like restrictive zoning. Both Maine and Texas had recent success with state-level zoning reforms to support the creation of more starter homes, with advocates in many municipalities creating model codes to expedite building. We also need a more efficient local bureaucracy to fix the slow pace of city-level plan reviews. Creating separate development tracks for affordable housing, as implemented in Jacksonville, FL, can simplify the permitting process and reduce execution risks.
- Deploy Strategic Communication and Narrative Framing: Advocates must change their language to neutralize NIMBYism. For example, framing construction as “building for seniors and veterans” often secures approval where other phrasing fails. The goal is to frame housing as an economic issue rather than a social or moral concern. This enlightened self-interest approach allows CDOs to recruit unlikely allies like local Chambers of Commerce.
CASE STUDY: Engaging Higher Education to Increase CDC Capacity by Lulu Harding
Problem
Developing affordable housing requires a mix of expertises: urban planning, community engagement, complex financial layering and regulatory compliance to name a few. Mission-driven developers must compete with the private sector for this specialized talent, often paying a premium to even get a project on the drawing board. This creates an entry barrier that prevents many projects from ever leaving the concept phase.
Solution
Strategic partnerships with higher education institutions can serve as a workaround for intensive labor costs for affordable housing development. Universities can act as a subsidized research and design partner, deploying advanced graduate students and faculty experts to handle technical pre-development tasks. By utilizing architectural studios for site design and business schools for financial modeling, developers can bypass traditional professional fees while derisking projects before significant capital is deployed. This model transforms the university into a structured pipeline of high-level technical assistance, lowering the entry barrier for mission-driven housing projects.
Implementation
Auburn University’s Rural Studio demonstrates how academic design-build programs can serve as high-impact R&D centers for affordable housing. This model utilizes university-backed research to pilot low-cost construction techniques, such as the use of recycled materials and energy-efficient building envelopes, to create high-performance housing tailored to the lowest-income residents. These solutions are then made available to affordable housing developers.
Impact
The most significant output of this effort are their annual “20K Home” model, a market-ready prototype designed to be built for a total cost of $20,000 ($12,000 for materials and $8,000 for labor and profit). By targeting this specific price point, Rural Studio has created a housing model where the monthly mortgage aligns with what a person on social security or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families can afford to pay.
To date, the program has delivered more than 220 affordable, energy-efficient homes while training 1,200 future architects and developers in the ethics of equitable design. Beyond individual structures, the program has scaled its influence through the Front Porch Initiative, which translates these architectural successes into broader policy advocacy and the development of community infrastructure like playgrounds and chapels.
Lesson
The Rural Studio model proves that cross-sector partnerships succeed when they provide measurable reciprocal value. The key success factor is its benefit for both university students getting real-world technical training and the community getting derisked projects that respond to community needs. By aligning architectural curriculum with the social and political realities of housing, universities can provide the necessary technical assistance to create neighborhoods that are both physically stable and economically accessible.
Leverage Shared Data for Advocacy
Nonprofits must stop relying on intuition and start leading with evidence. Meticulously gathering and sharing both statistical and narrative data allows organizations to demonstrate profound impact, appealing directly to the financial interests of external partners. To effectively bridge the gap between intuition and evidence, organizations should consider these data-driven strategies:
- Marry Data with Narrative: Organizations must be in control of the story. Data alone doesn’t tell the whole story and it needs to be paired with narratives that hit stakeholders emotionally. This approach moves people from nodding to committing to action. Infographics and clear visualizations should explain the complexity of community work to a general audience.
- Prove the Economic Case to Unlikely Allies: While mission-oriented language works for many of our constituents, business leaders don’t always respond to social justice arguments. They respond to value propositions. Use data to show hospitals that have stable housing cuts emergency room costs and reduces readmissions. Show employers that housing assistance boosts retention. Financial data should frame discussions around an anchor investors overall portfolio value, rather than the isolated costs of a requested investment, proving that community development offers a competitive ROI.
- Standardize Data Collection: Different measurements of similar issues obfuscates the problem and complicates advocacy. Cities need to quantify their affordable housing stock and identify specific needs using standardized census data. Additionally, staff need additional support and training on how to use data portals and connect the indicators available there to the programmatic interventions in their community.
- Streamline Processes and Reduce Friction: Data isn’t just for looking back at what has happened but for projecting what could be in the future. An example from a participant highlighted how pooling loan records allowed them to create scoring models that cut microloan approval times from weeks to 24 hours. Advocates should also use data to push for standardized reporting requirements to reduce the administrative burden of quarterly reports.
CASE STUDY: Quantitative Data in Advocacy by Clelia Bellipanni
Problem
Advocacy in the affordable housing space is typically championed through qualitative efforts using an ethical and moral lens. However, due to personal disconnect from housing instability, advocating for deeply affordable housing targeted to those making less than 60% of an Area’s Median Income continues to be a challenge. Additionally, the vastness of the challenge has made it difficult for many to grasp the housing crises on a local scale.
Solution
Neighborhood Development Collaborative (NDC), an advocacy organization in Denver, shifted the conversation with both the public and politicians by pairing ethical appeals with the quantitative economic consequences on the county and state levels. By leveraging Geographic Information Systems (GIS), NDC translated abstract social needs into localized economic data points, presenting housing not just as a moral obligation but as a critical factor for regional economic stability.
Implementation & Impact
NDC used data from housing needs assessments to drive the campaign for Proposition 123, which created a statewide affordable housing fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The housing needs assessments revealed a stark picture: Colorado didn’t have enough housing across the board for all income levels. NDC provided every elected official with the exact number of units missing in their community. This localized data made the crisis unavoidable and positioned Proposition 123 as the direct mechanism for developers to close the gap. Those same data tools are now being used to help guide implementation and ensure accountability.
Lessons
While most nonprofits excel at qualitative storytelling and grassroots organizing, they often lack the quantitative capacity to make their case compelling to policymakers. Organizations should view data not as a replacement for community stories but as the necessary evidence to scale those stories into policy wins. Developing in-house GIS expertise is a significant hurdle for smaller nonprofits. Even having internal leadership with GIS training, NDC needed additional resources that are challenging to find. NDC partnered with local universities to source interns and fellows, creating a scalable pipeline.
Nashville Summit Series
Coming Soon:
BRIEF 3: Barriers & Solutions for Affordable Housing
BRIEF 4: Barriers & Solutions for Small Business
BRIEF 5: Barriers & Solutions for Workforce Development
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