By Robbie Sequeira, Stateline.org
In U.S. cities big and small, mayors are finding their tenures shaped by housing shortages, and efforts to build more homes, so that people of any income can afford a place to live.
In a series of conversations, mayors of big cities such as Atlanta and Seattle, as well as of midsize Midwest cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin, told Stateline that housing is the No. 1 priority for mayors to tackle.
“Housing is by far one of the most important issues facing every mayor in America. It impacts everything from safety to the workforce to transit,” said Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, who also is the immediate past president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Mayors are on the front lines of our nation’s housing crisis. And it is a crisis.”
More than half of mayors in a recent bipartisan survey expect affordability in their cities to decline over the next year, and nearly all say their residents are dissatisfied with current housing costs. The survey was released in June by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, along with the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Capital One Insights Center.
And while a large share of big-city mayors are Democratic, members of both parties are seeking some nonpartisan solutions. Republican Mark Shepherd of Clearfield, Utah, and Democrat Rex Richardson of Long Beach, California, are pressing Congress to expand rental assistance and affordable housing programs, while also partnering with business leaders to boost supply. The two mayors help lead a coalition called Mayors and CEOs for U.S. Housing Investment.
Housing is a pivotal issue in next month’s mayoral races in Minneapolis, New York City and Seattle.
But even as mayors set ambitious targets, they’re often working within narrow lanes of authority. While city halls can zone land, streamline permits and invest local dollars, they can’t override state preemption laws or control climbing construction costs and interest rates. In many municipalities, the success and reach of a mayor’s housing vision hinges as much on what state lawmakers allow as on what local voters demand.
At least 30 states have barred cities from enacting rent control. Other factors not related to the push-and-pull of home rule between state and local governments cap how much mayors can influence housing within their borders.
“You have to analyze what you can control and what you can’t,” Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said. “Interest rates, tariffs, the cost of materials — those are conditions we can’t fix. What we can do is plan smarter, permit faster and fund what’s within our reach.”
A fast-growing metro area
Ginther, the Columbus mayor, could talk about housing all day. He told Stateline he can’t imagine a mayor in the country who doesn’t have housing consistently on their minds.
As Columbus grapples with record growth and rising housing costs, Ginther says the city’s biggest challenge isn’t political will, it’s scale. Columbus needs 200,000 more housing units in the next 10 years to help bring down the cost of rents and ownership, he said.
Ginther, who is serving his second term, recently proposed creating a Division of Housing Stability. He said that mayors need to use the talent in their offices and agencies to tackle different aspects of the housing crisis, from helping residents find an affordable home to enabling them to keep it.
He’s also said that city voters’ willingness to approve big-dollar bond issues is a “buy-in” that many cities would be fortunate to have.
Since 2019, the city has used $250 million in bonds to build about 4,000 rental units. Voters are being asked to support another $500 million housing bond this November, along with other bonds for parks, police and fire, and road paving. More than half the city’s residents are renters.
Ginther said it’s a part of a $1.9 billion infrastructure package — combining city, county, state, federal and private resources — to reach the 200,000-unit goal.
“It’s ambitious, but if we commit to housing the way we’ve committed to jobs and workforce development, we’ll get it done.”
According to census data, the Columbus metropolitan area ranks among the fastest-growing U.S. metros. Meanwhile, the Ohio Housing Finance Agency reports that from 2016 to 2021, the state saw a 38% decline in vacant units available for sale or rent, and during the same period saw a 13% increase in units classified for seasonal, recreational or occasional use, such as short-term rentals.
“The city has created jobs and we have one of the fastest-growing economies in the Midwest, but we didn’t build enough housing in previous years to keep up with that. And we have been only doing it a certain way,” said Ginther.
He added that the scale of housing issues is bigger than any one jurisdiction.
“We need regional and state partners to step up, too,” Ginther said. “I’ve said I’ll do half the [Franklin County] region’s housing needs … but I need my suburban and exurban neighbors to do their part.”
The squeeze in small cities
In northern Utah’s Davis County, Clearfield is proudly the home of Hill Air Force Base. Since the 1940s, a large share of military air force personnel have worked and lived nearby.
But Shepherd, the mayor, says his city — with about 32,000 people and once the blue-collar “starter home capital” — has transformed into a market that military families can no longer afford.
“It’s scary,” Shepherd, a Republican who was elected in 2013, told Stateline. “We used to be where people came for their first homes. Now, four airmen are splitting a two-bedroom apartment.”
Despite limited land, Clearfield has permitted or built 4,000 homes in five years, many through denser, vertical development. Shepherd, a longtime real estate agent, is pushing for Utah to expand condominium construction and creative financing tools, including through a new $300 million state loan program.
“Everybody wants ownership,” he said. “If someone wants to buy, we have an obligation to help make that happen.”
But he’s frank about the political headwinds: resistance to density, neighboring cities blocking townhome projects, and a state legislature eager to preempt local control.
“Density is a swear word for elected officials,” Shepherd said. “Some cities just won’t build, and when the carrot doesn’t work, sometimes you have to bring out the stick.”
Shepherd said housing challenges are a constant topic among his peers across the country, especially in communities tied to military installations. As a member of the National League of Cities’ Military Communities Council, he regularly exchanges ideas with other mayors facing similar shortages.
“I haven’t had one mayor of a military city tell me they’re totally fine with housing,” he said. “Everywhere, it’s the same story. … The demand is high, the supply is tight, and servicemembers are getting priced out.”
Pressure from outside city borders
In Atlanta, one of the economic and cultural hubs of the South, Mayor Andre Dickens has seen the city get some good headlines in its efforts to address housing issues.
According to Realtor.com’s August 2025 rental report, the median asking rent in metro Atlanta dropped 13.6% year-over-year, one of the largest declines among the 50 biggest U.S. metros, tied with Las Vegas. Dickens credits the trend to an intentional surge in housing production.
In just under four years, Dickens has reached 60% of his goal to build or preserve 20,000 units of lower-cost housing by 2030, he said. Since taking office, he said that 12,000 units are already built or underway, aided by an Affordable Housing Strike Force that meets monthly to fast-track permits and secure funding for those projects.
“Atlanta was seen as affordable compared to New York or California, but our incomes weren’t keeping up,” Dickens told Stateline. His approach, in addition to approving a boost in city workers’ pay last year, was to help create more housing. “We made it our mission to build for low- and moderate-income families and to stop people from being rent-burdened.”
Among the projects Dickens touted to Stateline was the Atlanta Beltline, an urban redevelopment along 22 miles of rail line that delivered 569 affordable housing units last year — almost double its annual goal. The aim is 5,600 units in the area by 2030. Funding often combines public and private sources, and Dickens said that as the mayor, it’s his responsibility to bring these groups to the table.
He also noted that the city is dealing with an influx of residents both from Atlanta’s suburbs and from cities that have their own housing challenges, such as Chicago, New Orleans and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“Some suburban or rural counties don’t invest in homelessness or affordability, so those residents eventually land in cities,” said Dickens, who also is a co-chair of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, a coalition of elected officials.
“We can’t push them away,” he said. “We just have to deal with it, because cities are where people come for hope and help. That’s why mayors must lead with compassion and strategy.”
Kitchen-table terms
In Wisconsin, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway told Stateline that the capital city’s housing challenge is simple but daunting:
“We were not building enough housing to keep up with our population growth,” said Rhodes-Conway, who was elected in 2019. “We built ourselves into a problem.”
Madison is Wisconsin’s fastest-growing city, but housing supply lagged far behind. When Rhodes-Conway took office in 2019, the city’s rental vacancy rate hovered around 1-2%, she said, far below the healthy 5-6% range.
Since then, Rhodes-Conway and the City Council have opened new funding channels and loosened zoning rules to speed construction. The city’s Affordable Housing Fund, once focused solely on federally funded Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects, now includes money for co-ops, community land trusts and homeownership efforts, she said.
“It was important to invite folks to think creatively about how we create affordability,” she said.
Her administration also works to preserve existing affordable stock through the Efficiency Navigator program, which upgrades older apartments for energy efficiency in exchange for rent-stability commitments. On the regulatory side, Madison has updated its zoning code to clear “pain points” such as density limits and onerous approval processes that once stalled projects, she said.
The results are tangible, as the city has completed more than 17,000 new homes since 2015, with another 5,000 under construction. Under a regional plan, Madison aims to add 15,000 more between 2025 and 2030, aligning with Dane County’s housing goals.
Rhodes-Conway sees the role of a housing-focused mayor to be both a policymaker and a translator.
Mayors need to discuss housing not in zoning jargon, she said, but in kitchen-table terms: stories about parents who can’t afford to buy where they grew up, the seniors priced out of longtime homes, or workers enduring farther commutes for a reasonable, cost-efficient living situation.
“Talking about NIMBYs and AMIs [area median incomes] doesn’t help,” she said. “Talking about your neighbor or your kid who can’t find an apartment, that’s real life.”
Personal experience
Harrell, the Seattle mayor, says he’s trying to turn one of America’s priciest markets into a working model of coordinated, city-level housing governance. When Harrell took office in 2022, he declared himself a “housing mayor.” Seattle’s population growth and its million-dollar home prices demanded more than a single department could manage, he said.
“I realized a city as large as Seattle had a fragmented housing policy,” Harrell said. “So we created a housing subcabinet — every department that touches housing now rows in the same direction.”
And when the state government does make changes to housing or zoning laws, that’s when mayors need to strike, he said.
In 2023, for example, Washington state allowed for the building of duplexes, triplexes and other forms of “middle housing” on land formerly zoned only for single-family homes. Seattle immediately adopted the change.
Harrell shepherded a $970 million property tax levy approved by voters in 2023 to help pay for affordable housing. The city’s new 20-year housing plan increases zoning capacity to allow for 330,000 new housing units, roughly double the target of the city’s previous plan. His administration has also accelerated permitting, which he said has “sped up some projects by one to two years.”
For Harrell, who hopes to win a second term in November, changing affordability in the city harks back to his parents’ first home in Seattle.
“The first house my mom and dad bought here in Seattle is still there,” Harrell said. “Same condition, same footprint. … It hasn’t had an addition. They bought it for $6,000 and sold it for $30,000. That same modest house today is worth over a million dollars.”
He then drew a parallel to his own experience buying a starter home in the 1980s.
“The first house I bought, I was making less than $40,000 a year, and I bought it for $87,000 with my college roommate, at about twice our income,” he said. “That house, too, is worth about a million now. I should’ve held onto it.”
These two homes capture the scale of the affordability crisis, he said.
“That’s the context we’re operating in,” he said. “And if I’m asking people who are already struggling with rent or mortgages to pay more into affordable housing through a levy, I have to be the evangelist. I have to show that we’re putting our own skin in the game.”
Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.
©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
0 Comments