Renaissance Philanthropy Opens RFI for Housing Production Innovators
Seeking early-stage solutions addressing critical pain points and friction in the system that produces housing in the U.S.
The United States is short an estimated four million homes, contributing to the lack of affordability and availability of housing for a wide swath of Americans in a wide range of communities. While there is broad agreement across the political spectrum that we need to build more, the system that produces housing is more complex, interdependent, and resistant to change than most people recognize. Today, Renaissance Philanthropy announced an open call for projects aimed at creating systems-level change in housing production. This Request for Information (RFI) invites innovators from any sector to submit early-stage solutions that can deliver system-level change. Qualified submissions will be aggregated and presented to philanthropic funders for consideration for financial support.
The Problem: Why Can't We Just Build More Housing?
The U.S. housing market has been out of equilibrium since the 2008 economic crisis disrupted production. Current construction rates are only barely keeping pace with new demand, let alone closing the distance. The result is a housing affordability crisis affecting Americans at nearly every income level, in urban, suburban, and rural communities alike.
The bulk of policy response to housing affordability challenges over the years has been complicated, rules-intensive programs that have added time and cost to building housing. But as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in Abundance, and Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works, it is the system itself that needs holistic simplification, predictability, and transparency. The problem is not that Americans lack the resources or the knowledge to build more housing. It is that the system of rules, approvals, and institutional friction governing housing production has made the process so arduous that much of the housing the nation needs is simply not profitable to build – so it does not get built. And in many communities, tools designed to give voice to the less empowered are used by the powerful and well-resourced to prevent housing from being built in order to protect their personal preferences and interests.
Neither government nor private developers are positioned or incentivized to invest in the kind of early-stage, systemic innovation that could change that. The HAPF was founded on the belief that only philanthropic funding can fill that gap in the near term by providing patient, non-dilutive capital to experienced innovators with credible hypotheses that have the potential to transform the housing production system at scale. The short answer to why we can't build more housing is that the system wasn't designed for abundance. That is what the HAPF intends to change.
About the Housing Abundance Philanthropy Fund
The HAPF, hosted by Renaissance Philanthropy, is currently leveraging scoping funding from founding supporters to pursue capitalization of its $30 million target. It will seek to provide grants in the anticipated range of $1 million to $2 million to early-stage solutions – prototypes, pilots, and proof of concepts – with the goal of supporting early-stage scaling efforts that address pain points and friction across the housing production value chain.
The HAPF captures the primary issues surrounding housing production into three central questions — where we build, how we build, and what the law allows us to build — and has mapped seven stages of housing production "from dirt to doorway", beginning with land identification and ending with occupancy, identifying specific pain points at each stage where targeted innovation can have an outsized impact. The fund is focused on four levers for transformative change: Technology and AI; Business Models; Regulatory Navigation; and Capital.
See our full pain points framework here.
Open Call for Innovators
Beginning today, the HAPF is accepting submissions through an open RFI from people and organizations working on solutions that can deliver system-level change in housing production.
We are collecting ideas as we scope the fund and will use them in two ways:
To share ideas with potential donors to show them the innovation opportunities available for activation
To case-make around the need for more funding to support housing innovation at the system-level
The fund welcomes submissions from any sector – public, academic, nonprofit, or private – and is particularly interested in early-stage, unproven concepts seeking capital to support prototypes, pilots, proof of concepts, or early scaling.
The HAPF is especially interested in solutions that:
Show how AI can be used to streamline regulatory processes while protecting the public interest
Make public and private data more reliable and accessible
Unlock latent land capacity connected to existing infrastructure
Lower the cost of construction capital
Scale industrialized construction methods to break the housing productivity plateau
Develop the skilled trades pipeline to meet the worker gap
Expand consumer pathways to occupancy beyond the 30-year mortgage and the 12-month lease
Submissions can be made here. The process is estimated to take less than an hour. The HAPF team will provide feedback on submissions within three weeks. Standout submissions will be added to a priority pipeline that will be shared with prospective funders and will receive prioritized consideration for grant funding once the fund is capitalized. The HAPF cannot provide project-based financing.
Please direct questions to housing@renphil.org.
About Renaissance Philanthropy
Renaissance Philanthropy is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fuel a 21st-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists and innovators. The organization designs time-bound, thesis-driven funds led by field experts and inspires talent to take action through playbooks and communities. In its first two years, Renaissance Philanthropy catalyzed $533M in philanthropic funding for science, technology, and innovation, launching 22 time-bound, thesis-driven, philanthropic funds and programs addressing global challenges.
