Des Moines needed clarity on a deceptively simple question: what were the city’s actual housing goals, and how should it go about meeting them? CZB had a long history in Des Moines to build on. Between 2017 and 2019, CZB helped the city and Polk County reorient their neighborhood revitalization efforts and establish a new nonprofit, Invest DSM, to carry that strategy forward. In 2019, CZB completed a Regional Workforce Housing Strategy that led the City of Des Moines to link its development incentives directly to inclusionary housing outcomes. CZB returned in 2024 and 2025 to build on that foundation with a Citywide Housing Strategy.
Market strength, regional parity, and neighborhood revitalization remained real priorities, but they weren’t the whole picture anymore. Des Moines wanted a complete “housing ladder,” one where households at different income levels and different stages of life could all find quality housing they could actually afford. Getting there meant more than reinforcing what was already working; it meant adding an entirely new tool to the city’s approach.
The 2025 Citywide Housing Strategy solidified the city’s existing, effective approaches across a range of housing issues, while introducing a genuinely new “line of business”: block-by-block, mid-density, mixed-income redevelopment, known as the “Whole Block” approach. The strategy was built to blend three goals that have historically been difficult to achieve together: economic revitalization of neighborhoods, reinvestment in rehabilitated and new housing stock, and preservation of substantial affordability.
With the 2025 Citywide Housing Strategy complete, Des Moines has a housing framework that connects nearly a decade of CZB’s work in the city, from the founding of Invest DSM through the 2019 Regional Workforce Housing Strategy, to a forward-looking Whole Block approach designed to achieve revitalization, reinvestment, and affordability at the same time, rather than trading one off against the others.
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