Ivory Innovations announced the top 10 finalists for the 2022 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability, a national award to recognize ambitious, feasible, and scalable solutions to housing affordability.
Selected from a list of top 25 finalists across three categories—construction and design, finance, and public policy and regulatory reform—these finalists present tangible solutions as Americans are increasingly priced out of safe and affordable housing.
“America’s housing affordability challenges need innovative solutions more than ever. This year’s Ivory Prize finalists provide unique but scalable approaches to this complex problem,” says Kent Colton, chair of the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability’s advisory board. “We congratulate each of our finalists and encourage other innovators, funders, elected officials, and industry leaders to engage with these efforts to have the greatest impact possible.”
The prize awards more than $200,000 between at least three winners selected across the three award categories. Ivory Innovations will announce the 2022 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability winners via a livestream event May 19 from the following top 10 finalists.
Construction and Design
Eightvillage, Atlanta: Eightvillage is a design and development firm focused on placemaking and community building. The firm started an initiative in 2019 called “Backyard ATL” that builds, designs, and manages accessory dwelling units for homeowners in Atlanta.
Forterra Forest to Home Initiative, Seattle: Forterra’s Forest to Home initiative brings together a coalition of tribes, communities of color, land trusts, and architects to reengineer the affordable housing supply chain. At the center of the initiative is an all cross-laminated timber modular prototype.
Volumetric Building Cos., Philadelphia: Volumetric Building Cos. is a volumetric modular business that simplifies issues by integrating architecture, logistics, manufacturing, and construction into a single package.
Finance
Blackstar Stability, Washington, D.C.: Blackstar Stability expands equitable ownership of affordable single-family homes by attacking predatory lending practices and restructuring distressed debt products. It works with families with land contracts and similar forms of seller financing to refinance their homes with traditional mortgages, improve their properties, and reduce costs.
True Footage, Seattle: True Footage is building technology and a new community of appraisers to collect cleaner data and deliver a more standardized appraisal product that leverages data to inform and validate comparable sales and valuation analysis.
Trust Neighborhoods, Kansas City, Missouri: Trust Neighborhoods is creating community-controlled real estate where gentrification threatens displacement. The organization’s mixed-income neighborhood trust, or MINT, owns and operates a portfolio of rental housing under community control to maintain permanent affordability.
Policy and Regulatory Reform
Build UP, Birmingham, Alabama: Build UP tackles root causes of intergenerational poverty to rebuild the minority middle class and close racial wealth disparities. It is the first group in Alabama to implement a curriculum designed by the Home Builders Institute, another top 25 finalist.
City of Cambridge (AHO Program), Cambridge, Massachusetts: The city’s Affordable Housing Overlay promotes more dense affordable housing development by nonprofit developers, who often get priced out by market-rate developers and are mired by cumbersome zoning and project approvals.
DC Flex, Washington, D.C.: DC Flex is a rent subsidy program that efficiently deploys federal rental assistance funds. Unlike other programs, where rental assistance goes to landlords, DC Flex assistance goes directly to residents.
Los Angeles Room & Board, Los Angeles: LA Room & Board’s mission is to end college student hunger and homelessness by partnering with university housing programs and campus adjacent property owners to reimagine the use of their vacant spaces.
