Dear City Leaders,
If there’s one issue uniting cities across the Americas in 2026, it’s the need to build more housing. A shortage of safe and stable homes is driving an affordability crisis in urban areas across North, Central and South America.
City leaders face some limitations when it comes to addressing housing. Factors such as high interest rates and the rising cost of labor and materials lie outside of their control. Local governments also lack the resources national governments and large financial institutions have to incentivize housing construction at scale.
However, despite the constraints, city leaders are increasingly finding opportunities to demonstrate strong leadership on housing — a trend likely to accelerate in 2026. They’re being creative about identifying and leveraging the tools they do have to reduce construction costs, boost housing supply and connect residents to homes they can afford. Often, this means doing the unglamorous but critical work of strengthening core operations to unlock housing supply. Investing in local data capabilities and accelerating the use of artificial intelligence are also enablers of progress.
Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities Certified cities are moving from practice to action. In Canada, Edmonton, Alberta (Silver Certified), is using AI to handle routine compliance tasks associated with building permits. Edmonton’s “auto-review” feature means builders can get residential permits for single and semi-detached homes in certain parts of the city the same day, compared with a typical 20-day wait period. In the United States, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Platinum Certified), performed a detailed analysis of housing affordability and availability before making zoning changes to enable more construction of affordable and multifamily housing — changes that are sparking production. And in Argentina, Buenos Aires (Gold Certified), built a 3D map to make it easy for developers to see what they can build where, without having to dig through voluminous regulations and zoning maps and significantly reducing the staff time typically spent answering queries.
As local leaders look for new ways to innovate on housing in 2026, here are a few things they should keep in mind:
First, set ambitious but achievable goals and track your progress. Accelerating housing production requires close collaboration among numerous agencies inside City Hall, as well as private-sector and nonprofit developers, banks, community groups and other external stakeholders. Setting a clear goal can give these collaborations a common sense of purpose, a benchmark to measure performance against and a tool for holding partners accountable. Look at Washington, D.C. (Gold Certified), where Mayor Muriel Bowser set out six years ago to get 36,000 new housing units built by 2025 — a goal she accomplished five months ahead of schedule.
Second, identify what you can influence and drive impact. While local leaders can’t do anything about macro factors like interest rates, they have great influence over how difficult or easy it is to get housing built in their community. They can cut red tape out of permitting processes, strategically rezone land to encourage new development, and make underutilized publicly owned land available for housing development, among other strategies. Small changes can add up to big savings for builders, home buyers and renters.
For example, in Philadelphia (Gold Certified), city leaders used a performance management process to reduce the Zoning Board of Adjustment’s appeal process from a high of 78 days to a low of 12 days over a seven-month period. In Denver (Silver Certified), a cross-departmental permitting “tiger team” used data to collaborate on accelerating processes and reducing review times by 30 percent. And in Medellín, Colombia (Silver Certified), city leaders are using data on home conditions to inform an income-limited housing preservation program that offers women, older adults and people with disabilities subsidies of as much as $4,800 to reinforce foundations, walls and roofs of their homes.
Third, leverage AI. Amid lean budgets, stretched city staffers can use AI as a force multiplier. San José, California (Gold Certified) and Hamilton, Ontario (Silver Certified) are using AI to prescreen permit applications for required documentation. The process shaves days off permitting times and frees up staff to handle other tasks. Pittsburgh (Gold Certified) is doing something similar with rental housing vouchers, using AI to scan applications for errors and allowing staff to spend more time helping applicants find housing. There are roles for AI in helping cities to streamline housing regulations, identify buildable land, and answer residents’ questions, and new use cases are emerging all the time. By now, most Certified cities have the policies they need in place to use AI responsibly. 2026 is the year they need to put AI to work on helping to solve big challenges.
At What Works Cities, we will be tracking all the ways local governments are leaning into housing innovation in the year ahead. As always, we will be supporting their efforts to use data and AI to supercharge this work. Our international network of city leaders from more than 100 Certified cities in 10 countries representing over 97 million residents is eager to share ideas and lessons learned. Together, we can ensure that more residents of our cities have safe and stable homes they can afford to live in.
Sincerely,
Rochelle Haynes
Senior Vice President & Managing Director
Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities
Results for America