Housing Abundance
Philanthropy Fund
A philanthropic fund catalyzing system-level change in housing production.
About
Several political and economic factors have created friction across the housing production value chain in the United States, resulting in a structural deficit of more than four million homes. This housing shortage is making housing unaffordable and unattainable to millions of Americans at all stages of life, at almost all economic levels.
The only answer to this problem is to build more housing.
But neither the market nor the public sector will close this gap without innovative modifications. The system that produces housing is more complex and interdependent across a multitude of silos than most people recognize, and improving it to reduce pain points and friction that ultimately produces more housing at lower cost will require application new technologies such as AI, new business models, and new approaches to policy.
The Housing Abundance Philanthropy Fund is an in-formation philanthropic fund, hosted by Renaissance Philanthropy, designed to accelerate and amplify early-stage innovations, supporting experienced innovators with scalable solutions and connecting them to the policymakers and public resource providers who can help drive systemic change.
More information can be found here.
Request for Information
The Housing Abundance Philanthropy Fund is currently developing a catalog of fundable projects with the potential to create system-level change in housing production. Our framing centers on three questions:
Where will we build?
How will we build?
What will the law allow us to build?
Within those questions, we have identified seven major pain and friction points across the housing production value chain where we believe innovative solutions can lead to a significant increase in housing production, and four primary levers to apply: technology and AI; business models; policy; and capital.
Our illustration of these pain points and the tools that we believe can respond to them can be found here.
We are currently conducting an open call for innovative programs, projects, and solutions that are coming from any sector (public, private, academic, non-profit). Our focus is early-stage, unproven concepts seeking capital to support prototypes, pilots, proof of concepts, or scaling.
Submission Details
Please follow the link here to submit your innovation.
The submission process should take less than an hour. After you submit, we will provide feedback within three weeks. Standout proposals will be added to a priority pipeline that we will share with prospective funders, and once the fund is capitalized, these proposals will receive prioritized consideration for grant funding.
While is an open call, we expect to present some of our initial submissions to potential funders no later than July. Please note that the HAPF cannot provide project-based financing.
We look forward to hearing about your housing system production innovation.
Questions or input can be sent to housing@renphil.org.
Program Team
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Matt Hoffman
Managing Director
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Jackson Dillard
Program Manager
Program Advisor
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Kumar Garg
President, Renaissance Philanthropy
Our Funders
Arnold Ventures
The Prudential Foundation