SALT LAKE CITY — Every community in the country is facing housing affordability challenges. Ivory Innovations wants to help policymakers, advocates, and everyday people to be aware of the innovative and impactful housing initiatives that are out there.

While part of that mission takes place via the Ivory Prize (an annual award recognizing ambitious but feasible solutions to housing affordability), there are more resources at the public’s disposal.

Ivory Innovations — a nonprofit that operates as an applied academic institution at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business — hosts a pair of databases intended to showcase unique and successful approaches to anyone interested.

The Housing Innovation Database is a collection of 500-plus creative entrepreneurial solutions that are changing the housing industry. Meanwhile, the Innovative Policies Database focuses on six primary topics: accessory dwelling units; office-to-residential conversion; small lot ordinances; social housing; transit-oriented development; and YIGBY (Yes in God’s Backyard).

The idea is to assemble in one place the policies, initiatives, and ideas that are both innovative and impactful, and to make them available to anyone. Then, after perusing myriad approaches taking place throughout the country, interested parties can adapt them to their own community’s needs.

The databases feature dozens of promising housing programs across federal, state, and local governments.

Some examples:

● Montana’s upzoning policies have been widely praised by housing advocates across the country. The policy database includes Montana’s Ordinance 11-4, responsible for eliminating minimum lot size requirements in residential districts and allowing for denser small lot development for housing. 

● The City of Boston’s Office to Residential Conversion Program — which was recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Ivory Prize — is one of the best in the country for encouraging office-to-residential conversions to promote increased housing in downtown areas.

Government policies at every level — local, federal, and state — deeply shape housing outcomes. Such policies impact where housing can be built, what it looks like, how it’s built, how it’s paid for, and who can afford to live there. 

As these databases show, Ivory Innovations celebrates and supports innovators making an impact on housing policy across the United States to meaningfully increase housing supply and address the affordability crisis.

About Ivory Innovations: Ivory Innovations is dedicated to catalyzing innovative solutions in housing affordability. We work with students, entrepreneurs, and experts to source, support, and scale the most compelling housing solutions through the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability and Hack-A-House. In Utah, we put innovation into practice through our development of hundreds of affordable housing units each year. For more information about the Ivory Prize and Ivory Innovations, visit www.ivoryinnovations.org.