This study of best local government practices to reduce the cost of affordable multifamily rental housing was funded by the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency and the McKnight Foundation as the result of the Minnesota Challenge competition that was also sponsored by ULI Minnesota/Regional Council of Mayors and Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. The goal of the Challenge was to generate ideas that would reduce the costs of rental housing and give the state and local communities additional options for providing a full range of housing choices for low and moderate income residents. We hope that this study will particularly be useful to city policy makers and development staff and to affordable housing advocates. The description of best practices was developed from a survey of national literature 2and from interviews with 22 developers and housing/development/design professionals and with planning or development staff from 17 metro area cities and counties. An Advisory Board of housing professionals provided insights and feedback. 3 We believe this sample gave us a good sense of what metro cities are doing well, but we will obviously have missed many good examples.