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Housing Abundance

The United States has a shortage of 7 million housing units. The shortage is a regulatory failure — engineered by zoning, permitting, and federal tax subsidies that capitalize into land prices. The Accord removes the zoning barriers that prevent the private market from building, certifies factory-built designs for nationwide deployment, and provides the workforce to execute at scale.

Unit Shortage
7M
regulatory failure
Annual Target
+1.5M/yr
above current baseline
20M Target
~Yr 15
prices → 3× median
Federal Housing Standards Board Cost Cut
30–40%
vs site-built
Civic Response NetworkCivic LifeCommunity InvestmentHousingPBS & Public MediaLocal NewsPost Office 2.0COMPASS
Unit Production Trajectory — Additional Units Above Baseline
DNA Scoring Endnote 15 · thousands of units per year
Yr 1
Yr 2
Yr 3
Yr 4
Yr 5
Yr 6
Yr 7
Yr 8
Yr 9
Yr 10
Target rate reached (≥1.3M/yr)
Below target
ZRIG — Zoning Reform Incentive Grant
Conditions federal infrastructure funding on build-by-right adoption. Non-compliant municipalities lose allocations on a graduated schedule.
⊞
ADUs by Right
Accessory dwelling units permitted on any residential lot meeting minimum size. No discretionary review. No owner-occupancy requirement.
⊟
Duplexes & Triplexes
Permitted by right in all residential zones. No discretionary design-review hearings for infill projects that comply with the code.
⬡
Mid-Rise Near Transit
4–6 stories permitted within one-quarter mile of transit stops. The 15-Minute Standard: ZRIG rewards walkable mixed-use.
✕
No Parking Minimums
Minimum parking requirements eliminated within transit corridors. A standard that distorts land use and inflates construction costs by 15–30%.
Penalty Schedule — Infrastructure Allocation Loss
Year 110%Opening signal
Year 225%Meaningful pain
Year 350%Highway + water + transit
Year 4+100%Full funding loss
Federal Housing Standards Board — Factory-Built Housing Standards
Federal preemption of local design review for certified factory-built housing. 30–40% lower cost than site-built. Climate-controlled quality. Rapid deployment.
Year 1120KExisting manufactured capacity
Year 3250K5–7 new factories online
Year 5400KFull phase-1 scaling
Year 7+500K+2nd-generation factories
Factory-built does not mean mobile homes. The Accord funds 5–7 new permanent-foundation factory lines Year 1–3 using the existing manufactured housing workforce + Parity Wedge labor supply.
Community Land Trusts — Permanent Affordability
The Accord seeds CLT formation with a $10B federal grant program. Land trusts remove land from the speculative market permanently — homeowners build equity on the structure but not the land. Proven model: Burlington VT CLT has maintained affordability since 1984 through multiple cycles.
CLT Seed Fund
$10B
federal grant
Density Bonus
Tiered
tied to affordability units
Burlington VT precedent
1984
proven across multiple cycles
Federal Land-Value Surcharge

Tax land, not improvements — phased in over 8–10 years

The single largest distortion in US housing today is a demand-side subsidy regime — the Mortgage Interest Deduction and Section 121 capital-gains exclusion — capitalizing into land prices on a structurally fixed supply. The Accord weans the country off those subsidies and shifts the federal tax burden onto the unimproved value of land itself. The mechanism is a phased-in Land-Value Surcharge (LVS) that starts at 0.1% in Year 1, rises 0.05% per year, and reaches a terminal 0.5% by Year 9. Structured as an income-tax adjustment under the 16th Amendment (the “LAND Act” legal model), the LVS avoids the apportionment-clause friction a direct land tax would face and rides on settled federal income-tax authority.

The MID and Section 121 exclusion phase out on the same glide path, replaced by a flat First-Time Stability Credit available only to middle- and low-income first-time buyers — restoring the original homeownership-promotion intent without the runaway capitalization. Federal grants (transportation, infrastructure, housing) become conditional on locality-level supply reforms: parking-decoupling, vacancy multipliers on idle lots near transit, by-right approvals for compliant infill, and elimination of single-family-only zoning in transit-served areas. When regional housing prices exceed a Housing- Finance-Board-defined surge threshold, the Speculation Brake fires automatically: a 0.25% transaction tax on non-primary residences and an LTV cap reduction to 60% on the same.

Land-price decline: ~5.9% nominal at terminal rate (capitalization formula)
Equity shift: ~$1.36T from current landholders to future residents
Annual federal revenue: $108–115B/yr at terminal rate
NPV at 5% discount: ~$2.16T
Units liberated: 250K–400K/yr from speculative margins
Toward: closing the structural shortage
Structurally additive at the federal layer — not a replacement for state/local property tax. Position paper at /believes/housing-shortage.
Land that's already there but not yet building homes

Bring underutilized parcels into productive supply

Underutilized-land surcharge
A vacancy fee on developable urban land held without development

Developable urban land held vacant past a threshold pays an annual surcharge calibrated to the local housing-shortage signal. Triggers via the COMPASS housing-domain indicator at the tract level — the surcharge activates only where the shortage is documented, not as a blanket land tax.

Suspension grounds:
  • Parcel in active permitted development
  • Owner-occupied homestead
  • Documented infrastructure constraint (utility capacity, soil remediation)
  • Designated open-space conservation
A COMPASS-triggered local vacancy fee — narrower scope than the federal Land-Value Surcharge above (which prices all land value at a flat 0.5% terminal rate). This instrument targets land-banking specifically in documented shortage tracts.
Federal-asset repurposing pathway
Streamlined review when historic, environmental, or accessibility designations block housing redevelopment of empty federal buildings

Federal buildings that have been underutilized for 5+ years in tracts with documented housing shortage enter a streamlined repurposing review. Historic-designation, environmental, and accessibility requirements remain on the table — but they're evaluated against the public benefit of resolving the local housing shortage rather than treated as absolute blockers.

Canonical example: the Portsmouth NH federal building. Architecturally interesting, empty for years, sitting in a city with a documented housing shortage. The pathway resolves which obligation prevails — and gets buildings back into productive use rather than perpetuating empty inventory.
A procedural pathway, applied at the agency level. It preserves the substance of the protected designations while restoring the priority of housing supply when both purposes can be served.
The workforce constraint is real. ZRIG + Federal Housing Standards Board + CLTs can only work if construction workers exist to execute. The Accord addresses this directly: Parity Wedge brings 1.75M workers annually, 25% dedicated to housing sector via hosting locality allocation. Bridge Year + Skills Wallet fund apprenticeship pipelines. The construction labor shortage is solvable — it requires both the demand signal and the supply pipeline.