America’s housing crisis is not a glitch in the system—it’s a feature. For more than a century, exclusionary zoning has weaponized the single-family house, first to keep Black families out, then to lock entire cities into sprawl and scarcity. This legacy continues to choke off the production of affordable homes today. 

But the housing crisis isn’t just a policy failure, it’s also a design failure. Transportation engineers can’t move people stuck in traffic, planners can’t create cities people want to live in, and architects can’t design buildings that people want to live in, or near. For many, the professions that are responsible for shaping our built environment have contributed to its unlikability.

A key outcome of this design failure is NIMBYism, where residents endorse development in the abstract but reject it within their own neighborhoods. A century ago, design promised a better future: Modernist design would replace Victorian excess with functional simplicity; steel, glass, and machine-made forms would free workers and clear away clutter. But the social mission behind design soon faded, co-opted by capitalism as a marketing tool to sell newer, trendier, and pricier products. The architecture of progress became the aesthetic of profit.

Architectural Design

Architecture shapes human experience by creating spaces that are useful, safe, sustainable, and beautiful. It reflects culture, meets shared needs, and expresses both local identity and universal values, from the grandeur of European palaces to the calm simplicity of Japanese design. Yet today’s built environment often falls short of these ambitions. The ubiquitous box has become a symbol of convenience-driven design: impersonal, cheap, detached. It reflects a culture that equates ease with freedom while sacrificing character and community.

Public backlash against new development often targets the blandness of mass-produced residential projects. But housing design involves far more than aesthetics. Globally, architects and researchers explore how design affects quality of life in multifamily dwellings, studying a wide range of typologies between detached houses and high-rise towers. Examples such as stacked rowhouses, courtyard apartments, and midrise complexes demonstrate that housing diversity can enhance affordability and livability.

In the U.S., housing design lacks this variety. Most multifamily buildings use the double-loaded corridor, which may be efficient, but is terrible for light, ventilation, and social connection. Research links such layouts to higher depression rates. Zoning and building codes worsen the problem, banning “missing middle” types and enforcing rules like dual stairways that stifle innovation and lock in uniform housing models.

Developers, driven by cost and risk aversion, rely on standardized plans and proven formulas. Architects, working under low fees, are discouraged from innovation, as originality is seen as impractical or financially risky. As a result, multifamily housing in the U.S. remains trapped in a cycle of repetition: efficient but uninspired, safe but soulless. To confront the housing crisis, we must make well-designed multifamily housing desirable, and build it in cities people genuinely want to live in. 

Urban Design

Creating these environments is the central task of urban design, which involves many different players—government, developers, and the public—with conflicting goals. Once driven by visionaries like Camillo Sitte, Baron Haussmann, and Ildefons Cerdà, urban design has been absorbed into planning, where policy and data often eclipse spatial and aesthetic intent. To become relevant again, it must reclaim its role in shaping streets, buildings, parks, and public spaces that are functional, beautiful, and socially resonant.

Today, private developers largely dictate the physical form of cities, prioritizing profit over public life. With no single steward of urban design, accountability for poor outcomes is diffuse, and quality often suffers. Compounding this is the misconception of what “urban” means in the U.S. The term evokes congestion and decay and has been shaped by the legacy of midcentury “urban renewal,” which destroyed communities and reinforced inequity. Even contemporary “urban” enclaves often replicate exclusion, offering curated grit within sanitized, policed environments.

Yet the urban ideal need not be bleak. Around the world, cities thrive by providing abundant housing, generous public space, and diverse mobility options—often surpassing suburban standards of comfort and livability. At its heart, a city’s greatest asset is its public realm, the streets and squares where civic life unfolds. Urban buildings exist not as isolated objects, but as the walls and facades that define those shared spaces. The ultimate goal of urban design should be clear: to enable a good life for all who live in and visit the city. Too often in the U.S., that ambition has been forgotten.

Mobility Planning

The goal of mobility planning is to create accessible, efficient, and sustainable transportation systems that move people and goods safely while improving overall quality of life. It seeks to balance environmental responsibility, equity, and long-term community goals.

In the U.S., mobility planning remains singularly focused. In the vein of Henry Ford’s well-known quip about his automobiles—“any color you want, as long as it’s black”—cities permit “any mode you want, as long as it’s a car,” fueling congestion, pollution, and inequity.

Elsewhere across the globe, cities are embracing different models, integrating walking, cycling, transit, and micro-mobility to create healthier and more vibrant environments. Shifting trips away from cars cuts greenhouse gas emissions, reduces air and noise pollution, and improves public health. For those who can’t afford or operate a car, multimodal systems offer affordable, reliable access to jobs, education, and services. “Complete streets,” designed for all users, improve safety and reduce costly, and often deadly, collisions.

Reducing car dependency results in cities that are more inclusive for children, seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income residents. Walkable “15-minute” neighborhoods boost local economies, lower commuting stress, and reclaim land for housing, parks, and public life.

The principles in question are well established and have been successfully applied in numerous global contexts. California’s SB 79, which introduces a legal foundation consistent with proven international models, suggests that a similar urban transformation would find broad support among the state’s political, professional, and civic spheres. The real challenge is that few people in the U.S. actually know how to make this happen.

Tyranny of the Market

The housing crisis is most severe in cities where real estate speculation drives development and commercial interests override community needs. In contrast, many European cities produce higher-quality urban environments at a lower cost, guided by municipal authorities and independent design professionals committed to the public good rather than profit.

U.S. design disciplines must reclaim their leadership role, and local governments must not only permit development but also actively shape it. Sadly, most American cities have resisted change for decades, leaving them unable to meet present demands or sustain existing systems. And design professions have failed to evolve, instead clinging to outdated, risk-averse practices.

The widening gap between the U.S. and its peers obscures a clear path forward. Urban renewal demands fresh ideas and diverse expertise. American professionals remain capable but constrained—economic pressures have curbed their civic ambition, while elsewhere, designers retain greater freedom to serve the public good.

At least initially, global professionals should be invited to collaborate with their U.S. counterparts in the renewal of our cities. Their willingness to employ innovative and unconventional solutions can demonstrate, through practice, that alternative approaches are viable and valuable. This exposure may, in turn, empower local professionals to once again trust in their education and professional judgment, rather than deferring to the predetermined preferences of developers. There is a strong need to introduce new ideas into the design discussion. This is a broad endeavor and will require a multistakeholder initiative to make it happen.

Historically, U.S. architectural education has elevated individual expression, formal experimentation, and landmark cultural projects over the systematic, policy-linked housing design that characterizes advanced practice abroad. Correcting this imbalance is not merely a curricular matter—it’s a critical intervention in the future of housing, urban equity, and the role of architecture itself.

Curricula should go beyond theory and include real-world case studies, best practices, and proven prototypes from around the world. Architects need practical tools to challenge an industry bound by risk aversion, cost concerns, and fear of failure, so they can create housing that is both innovative and socially meaningful. This means treating housing design not just as a technical task but as a civic responsibility.

Design professions need to create structures and mechanisms that encourage creative problem solving and introduce rewards for innovative solutions that are measurably better. One such approach is design thinking. While it can be traced back centuries (and perhaps even further), it gained traction in the modern business world after Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO, published an article about it in the Harvard Business Review in 2008.

Design thinking is a process that uses experimentation, prototyping, and feedback to develop better solutions. By learning from both successes and failures, it allows designers to test and improve ideas quickly. Unlike traditional policymaking, which is slowed by bureaucracy and politics, design thinking focuses on action, learning, and adapting in real time.

The best way to use design thinking is through pilot projects. These small-scale experiments test big ideas before full implementation, reducing risk and saving resources. They validate feasibility, refine strategies, and provide data that builds confidence and supports better decisions. Beyond measurable outcomes, pilots ignite a culture of innovation. They provide a safe space to challenge assumptions, explore alternative approaches, and build organizational capacity for adaptation and continuous improvement, thereby turning uncertainty into opportunity.

Finally, we must reconsider how professional commissions are awarded, shifting the process toward honoring expertise rather than reducing it to a repetition of past work. One mechanism stands out: the use of professional competitions. In the U.S., commissions are typically won through business development, where firms network with potential clients and demonstrate competence by showcasing previous projects. This process often prioritizes predictability over innovation, as clients tend to prefer proven formulas. As a result, professional expertise and creative thinking are undervalued, and competitiveness focuses more on cost than on design excellence.

By contrast, in other countries, projects are awarded through professional competitions. These are frequently anonymous, ensuring submissions are evaluated on merit rather than a firm’s reputation, and judged by panels of peers. Costs are standardized through published fee scales, removing economic pressures from the evaluation. This system transforms each project into a stepping stone for advancing innovation, fostering professional growth, and improving design outcomes. It aligns procurement with the public interest, rewarding creativity, expertise, and the exploration of new ideas rather than the safe reproduction of the familiar.

New Paradigms

The remedy for our housing crisis lies in reclaiming design’s civic purpose. Architecture must prioritize livability, diversity, and human experience. Urban design should create streets and spaces that foster joy, connection, and equity, not leave default form-making to market forces. Transportation planning must break free from car-centric bias and embrace multimodal systems that make cities walkable, healthy, and sustainable. Schools should train architects and planners to engage policy, economics, and community needs, grounded in global best practices. Design professionals must be empowered to experiment, supported by systems that reward creativity over repetition. 

The housing crisis reveals the limits of a system that confuses market efficiency with civic progress. To fix it, the U.S. must restore design’s role as a force for imagination, inclusion, and the public good, so that our cities reflect our highest aspirations.

Featured image via the New York Times.