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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
Zoning Reform — Voluntary, and Counted
A published reform menu states and localities adopt on their own authority — the Accord coerces no zoning decision. Locality effort and participation are among the considerations when COMPASS-triggered community grants are allocated.
⊞
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%.
Uncoerced by design
Zoning stays a state and local power, exercised locally. The Accord's levers are honest prices (the Land-Value Surcharge makes exclusion an expensive position) and honest accounting (COMPASS publishes every county's housing gap quarterly, and community-grant allocation weighs the effort a locality brings). Adoption will be uneven — the unit projections below say so rather than assuming compliance.
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 + Employer Parity Surcharge 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. Supply reforms — parking-decoupling, vacancy multipliers on idle lots near transit, by-right approvals for compliant infill, broader residential zoning — are a published menu that states and localities adopt voluntarily, with locality effort weighed in COMPASS community-grant allocation; the Accord conditions no federal grant on a zoning decision. 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. Which layer holds which housing lever: who does what.
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

The fee is calibrated to the local housing-shortage signal and triggers via the COMPASS housing-domain indicator at the tract level — it 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).
Federal-asset repurposing pathway
Streamlined review when historic, environmental, or accessibility designations block housing redevelopment of empty federal buildings

Buildings underutilized for 5+ years in tracts with documented shortage enter the review. The designations remain on the table — but they're weighed against the public benefit of resolving the local 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.
A procedural pathway, applied at the agency level.
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: the Employer Parity Surcharge intake brings 1.75M workers annually, 25% dedicated to housing sector via hosting locality allocation. Bridge Year + Skills Wallet fund apprenticeship pipelines.