Before I answer your question, I knew you were going to ask about London, because I sat on the finance committee with you during the pandemic and you asked about London every single day. I knew you would be true to character.
It's exactly the model that should be replicated across the country. London submitted, I should say, an ambitious application to grow its housing stock. They had e-permitting they wanted to adopt. They had upzoning. They had plans to focus particularly on affordable housing and supportive housing and recognizing that affordable housing is a health care issue. They were demonstrating leadership, but we didn't want to leave homes on the table that we could squeeze out of their housing accelerator fund application. We pushed them to do more to have four units, as of right, citywide, for example. We had conversations about what more they could do to continue to build homes, as they have plans to, around post-secondary institutions and around transit lines, and a handful of other measures.
They responded in the most encouraging way possible. They said, “Yes, yes, yes, we want to do it all, and if you support our application we'll be able to do it.” The result is that thousands of additional homes are going to be built in London over the next few years, but better than that, permanently changing the way that London permits homes to be built and the homes that they allow to be built is going to carry on forever.
This is the kind of thing that's going to have a lasting impact, not just over the next few years under the period of the housing accelerator fund's conflated timelines but permanently. It's this kind of change in cities like London across the country and in communities big and small that's going to help us escape the housing crisis and make sure ordinary people have homes they can afford.