2026 Housing Matters Symposium

This year's event, Yes in My Neighborhood, focuses on community-scale solutions that expand housing choices and strengthen neighborhoods, with keynote speaker Charles Marohn of Strong Towns.

Housing is an essential need for everyone, but rising costs are making it harder for many people to find the options they need. This event will look at ways communities can add new housing, support small-scale developments, and strengthen neighborhoods.

Registration is now open to save your spot for this popular annual gathering. Be sure to check back soon for more exciting announcements about our line-up of speakers!

Thank you to presenting sponsors AARP Iowa and the Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization for supporting this event.

Parking at the Iowa Events Center is located between the venue and Interstate 235 in a large surface lot with entrances off 3rd and 7th Streets. To access parking, take exit 8A from Interstate 235. The price is $13 for cars and trucks. The Iowa Events Center is a cashless facility. More parking information.

The Junior Ballroom is located on the 100 level of the EMC Expo Center and was previously known as the Iowa Hall of Pride.

Info: Talk of a "housing crisis" pervades North American cities—be it about off-the-charts rents in coastal cities or hyper-vacancy in the Rust Belt. These problems are symptoms of a deeper dysfunction. Over nearly a century, through often well-intended top-down policy interventions, we've turned a complex system that should be adaptive and self-correcting into one prone to a never-ending cycle of boom and bust, crises and overcorrections.

To address the dysfunction at the root of our housing problems, we need to shift our approach. We must move away from a model in which large developers and centralized financial institutions have unprecedented sway over what is built and where, to a more antifragile housing ecosystem in which the bar to entry is low, and every neighborhood can undergo incremental change over time.

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Host or Publisher Polk County Housing Trust Fund