How do you make affordable housing as sexy as cleantech?

After all, the cleantech revolution turned the staid energy industry -- the province of boilers and turbines and electric transmission lines -- into something exciting, even cool. Now everybody wants to be in it, work for it, invest in it.

Meanwhile, affordable housing, as fundamental to societal well-being as energy security, maintains a reputation as a dowdy old aunt. It's not seen as a business opportunity. Any appeal it might have had was undone by the mortgage meltdown.

That's a lost opportunity. As I've witnessed recently, there's some fresh thinking going on in the affordable housing world. It stands the chance of bringing the innovative business models that "mesh" companies like Kiva, Zipcar, and YouNoodle have brought to the relatively staid industries of microlending, car rentals, and entrepreneurism, respectively, by tapping into both the existing infrastructure that supports single family homes and getting more out of it, to deliver green benefits, as well as social and financial benefits.

A couple years ago I got a call from Dick Banks, a lifelong real estate guy who, for his swan song, had taken on the role of COO for one of the biggest nonprofit housing groups in the U.S., Mercy Housing. "There's a gap of 13 million units of affordable housing in this country," he told me at the time. "It's kind of like watching the glaciers of Antarctica melting into the ocean, except these aren't glaciers, they're the American dream. We're thinking about what it would take to actually close that gap once and for all."

He hired my firm, SVT Group, to investigate ways to think about the way social return on investment (ROI) of housing related to financial ROI, with the potential of tapping billions of dollars from the private markets to build affordable housing. That in turn led us to some of the leaders of the affordable housing movement, such as Neighborworks America (a line-item in the federal budget that provides technical assistance and funding to 250+ community development organizations) and Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF, led by William Kelly, a Latham & Watkins law partner who is also a board member of Ashoka) to take a fresh look at the hundreds of billions of dollars that are invested each year in the creation and preservation of America's housing stock -- both public and private money.

What we found is that overall, U.S. financial and land-use policies and incentives have driven development towards greater economic efficiency -- which, when viewed through the ubiquitous lens of short-term profit maximization and "cost effectiveness," segregates uses and incomes. This in turn has led to a system of housing that exacts myriad social and environmental costs (see: middle class crashing into the Arctic).