Stop Obessive Over Building Scale, Funders

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally. The housing crisis demands urgent action, but philanthropy’s obsession with rapid national deployment may be undermining the solutions we need most. We know there are no silver bullet solutions, yet many funders still seek silver bullet results: rapid scale, immediate return on investment, and national reach. Today’s most transformative housing innovations are often born from regional experimentation. Their strength lies not in speed, but in strategic growth—rooted in local context, adaptable, and built to last. What if we redefined scale as the ability to deliver consistent, resilient impact within a region—to weather volatility, serve communities over time, and build models others can learn from, rather than replicate whol

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• Jordan Sucher