1st Dec 2020

The nation is experiencing a major housing shortage coupled with a crisis of housing affordability. “New housing supply is not keeping pace with rising demand,” warns Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, citing a shortage of about 300,000 units a year. And innovation can have a significant impact. But as Matt Ridley recently stressed in the Wall Street Journal, we need to rethink the incentives for innovation, “to expand the use of prizes, to replace the reliance on grants, subsidies, and patents.” Prizes provide the opportunity to identify innovations that are already underway, as well as recognizing creative successes that can be expanded or repeated by others. To this end, the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability was established in 2018 to advance projects and reward innovators for their efforts to develop affordable solutions to tackle housing affordability.