2026 Ivory Prize winners leverage workforce development, zoning reform, tax abatements and public-private finance to expand and preserve housing affordability
SALT LAKE CITY, May 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ivory Innovations, an operating foundation and research center based at the University of Utah, today unveiled the winners of the 2026 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability, the organization’s annual award recognizing the most innovative, feasible and scalable solutions addressing the nation’s housing affordability crisis. This year’s winning organizations are delivering real-world, implementable, replicable solutions in pre-apprenticeship classrooms, city zoning codes, tax abatements and revolving loan funds.
The Ivory Prize evaluates submissions across three categories: Construction & Design, Policy and Finance, and selects winners whose innovations demonstrate the greatest potential to meaningfully improve housing affordability. The winners of the 2026 Ivory Prize are: TradesFutures in the Construction & Design category; City of Chattanooga and City of New Rochelle (co-winners) in the Policy category; and the City of Boston in Finance. Each of this year’s winners has uniquely engineered a replicable model leveraging assets such as existing authority, capital or infrastructure to unlock housing production or preservation at scale.
“The solutions we are honoring this year each identified a specific barrier to housing affordability and created a practical way to break through it,” said Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes and co-founder of Ivory Innovations. “TradesFutures is helping address the labor shortage issue by building the workforce we need to actually deliver more homes. Chattanooga is showing how smarter tax policy can unlock mixed-income housing. New Rochelle is proving that supply-forward local housing policy can help stabilize rents, even in high-growth markets. And Boston has built a financial model that gives mission-driven developers a better chance to compete with speculative investors. These are the kinds of innovations that can move the needle nationally, and they reflect exactly why the Ivory Prize exists.”
The nation’s housing shortage is estimated at millions of units, and construction costs, labor shortages, restrictive zoning and displacement pressures continue to outpace the public sector’s ability to respond. The 2026 Ivory Prize winners represent a new generation of solutions that can meet and defeat those challenges whether it’s on the jobsite, in the zoning code, in the tax assessor’s formula or at closing.
The 2026 Ivory Prize winners are:
Construction & Design Category
- TradesFutures — A national workforce nonprofit that supports the country’s largest network of construction pre-apprenticeship programs through a standardized, board-approved curriculum aligned with apprenticeship readiness. TradesFutures prepares young people and transitioning adults to enter and succeed in registered apprenticeship programs across the building trades, with a focus on recruiting women, veterans and individuals from underserved communities. By expanding the skilled labor pipeline, TradesFutures addresses one of the most persistent drivers of rising construction costs.
Policy Category (Co-Winners)
- City of Chattanooga: Affordable Housing PILOT — A per-unit tax abatement program that incentivizes mixed-income affordable housing production without direct public subsidy. In 2024, Chattanooga redesigned its Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program to directly tie the value of a property tax abatement to the actual cost of providing affordable units, a first-of-its-kind approach that transformed the program from a gap-filler for federally subsidized projects into a standalone local incentive for mixed-income housing. A publicly available online calculator makes the exchange of tax abatements for affordable units transparent for every applicant.
- City of New Rochelle: Zoning and Permitting Innovations — A comprehensive zoning, permitting and public-private development framework that has accelerated mixed-income housing production citywide. New Rochelle’s Downtown Overlay Zone, form-based codes and streamlined 90-day approval process for compliant projects have catalyzed the creation of approximately 4,500 new homes since 2020, making it one of New York’s fastest-growing cities, while its median rent declined as rents surge nationally.
Finance Category
- City of Boston: Acquisition Fund — A public-private revolving loan fund that provides rapid, low-cost acquisition financing to help mission-driven developers preserve naturally occurring affordable housing and prevent displacement. Administered by the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation (MHIC) and backed by a coalition of public agencies, hospitals and philanthropies, the Boston Acquisition Fund offers below-market-rate loans with streamlined underwriting, enabling nonprofit developers and community land trusts to compete with speculative investors. The fund is targeting the acquisition of 500 homes and the protection of more than 1,500 residents from displacement in its first five years.
The winners and runners-up were selected from a highly competitive field of more than 200 nominations and 25 finalists representing some of the most promising housing affordability solutions in the country. The 2026 Ivory Prize runners-up are Type Five and BoulderMOD in Construction & Design; Illinois Housing Development Authority: Access Plus and Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta: TogetherATL and GoATL Funds in Finance; and State of Colorado: Innovative Housing Incentive Program and City of Philadelphia and Housing Initiative at Penn: PHL Housing+ in Policy.
Applicants are evaluated based on each solution’s innovation, feasibility and potential for scale. Selections are made by Ivory Innovations’ Advisory Board, which includes national experts and leaders from across the housing industry. Since its inception, the Ivory Prize has built a growing portfolio of proven solutions from across the country and has become one of the nation’s leading platforms for identifying and elevating breakthrough approaches to the housing affordability crisis.
The 2026 Ivory Prize winners will be honored in person at the annual Ivory Prize Summit, a major national convening event that gathers leaders in the housing industry ranging from local, state and federal government officials to key public, private and non-profit stakeholders. This year’s Ivory Prize Summit will take place Oct. 14-15, in Tempe, Ariz.
For more information about the 2026 Ivory Prize winners, visit ivoryinnovations.org/ivory-prize.
About Ivory Innovations
Ivory Innovations is an academic center based at the University of Utah dedicated to catalyzing innovation in housing affordability. The organization works with students, entrepreneurs and experts to source, support, and scale the most promising housing solutions nationwide. Ivory Innovations also puts innovation into practice through its foundation arm, which has more than 1,500 affordable housing units under development in Utah. To learn more, visit ivoryinnovations.org.
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