Housing is where the GSRP's work becomes concrete.
It touches nearly everyone's daily life regardless of income, geography, or ideology. It is simultaneously a market, a social good, a racial justice issue, an environmental issue, and a governance failure. Its structural problems are visible and visceral — a teacher who can't afford to live in the district where she works, a family doubling up across generations, a workforce that can't locate near the jobs that need it.
And crucially, it is genuinely contested in ways that don't map neatly onto left and right. Serious analysts across the ideological spectrum have reached conflicting conclusions about what drives unaffordability and what would actually fix it. That complexity is exactly what the GSRP process is designed to navigate.
This page shows what a Housing working group does — the questions it asks, the tensions it sits with, and the kind of outputs it produces. It is an entry point into what the GSRP looks like from the inside.
Before a working group can deliberate, it needs a shared factual foundation. Not consensus on what to do — but agreement on what is actually happening and why. For housing, that foundation includes five interlocking realities.
The United States has chronically underbuilt housing for decades. The causes are layered: exclusionary zoning laws that prohibit multifamily construction across large swaths of American cities and suburbs; permitting processes that add years and cost to new development; neighborhood opposition — sometimes called NIMBYism — that has been institutionalized into land use law; and a financing system that rewards speculation over long-term affordability.
These are not market failures in the traditional sense. They are policy failures, many of them deliberate.
Housing cost burden — defined as spending more than 30% of income on housing — now affects more than 40 million American households. Severe cost burden (more than 50% of income) affects roughly 20 million. These numbers have grown steadily for four decades and accelerated sharply since 2020.
The households most affected are renters, low-income workers, and people of color — but cost burden has increasingly moved up the income ladder, now affecting households that would previously have been considered comfortably middle class.
Redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal, and discriminatory lending didn't just shape where people lived — they determined who could build wealth through homeownership and who couldn't. The racial wealth gap in the United States today is substantially a housing wealth gap.
Any analysis of housing that does not engage this history will misdiagnose what is happening in the present.
The United States has approximately 650,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night — a number that has grown despite decades of intervention. But homelessness is not a separate problem from housing affordability. It is the point at which the affordability crisis becomes acute and visible.
The evidence base on what works is stronger than public discourse suggests: permanent supportive housing, Housing First approaches, and targeted rental assistance have demonstrated results. The gap is not knowledge — it is political will and resource allocation.
The postwar American model tied household economic security to homeownership in ways that were explicit policy choices, not natural outcomes. The mortgage interest deduction, the GSEs, the highway system, and federal insurance programs all subsidized homeownership — primarily for white households in newly built suburbs.
The consequences of that design persist in property values, school funding, and generational wealth transfer today.
Shared factual foundation is not the same as agreement. The housing domain contains genuine structural tensions — questions where serious analysts disagree, where values conflict, and where the tradeoffs are real. The Investigation phase is where a working group sits with these tensions rather than bypassing them.
A GSRP housing working group does not produce a housing policy platform. It produces something more valuable and more honest: a set of evidence-grounded positions, developed by people who do not already agree, with minority views documented alongside majority ones, and with a clear assessment of which translation pathways the conclusions most naturally fit.
The working group moves from understanding to positions. What does the group actually conclude about the relationship between supply and affordability? About the appropriate role of local control? About what the history of racially discriminatory housing policy requires of present-day policy?
These conclusions are the group's own — not imported from experts, not driven by ideology, but developed through the deliberative process itself. Where the group does not reach consensus, the minority position is documented with the same care as the majority.
The working group assesses which pathways its conclusions fit. Some findings point toward legislative action — state-level zoning reform, federal rental assistance expansion, fair housing enforcement. Others point toward litigation — fair housing law has been underused as a tool for challenging exclusionary zoning. Others point toward the research ecosystem, toward community organizing, toward cultural change.
The goal is not to produce a report that sits on a shelf. It is to produce outputs that connect to the ecosystem of people and organizations already working on housing — giving them something they didn't have before.
Housing does not exist in isolation. A working group that treats it as a standalone domain will reach conclusions that are analytically incomplete. These are the five most significant connections — the places where findings in one domain directly shape what is possible in another.