The Affordable Housing Design Advisor (Design Advisor) is an online capacity-building tool designed to help developers, sponsors, and users of affordable housing understand what constitutes good-quality design, why it is worth striving for, and how to achieve it on their own projects. The Design Advisor was created by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and launched in 2001. This article describes the history and evolution of the Design Advisor through the intervening years, ending with the upgrading and relaunch of the tool in 2013. Decent, affordable housing is critical to the social and economic well-being of the United States. The need for such housing continues to far outstrip demand, and those projects that do get built suffer from severe cost constraints. Good-quality design—too often considered an expensive amenity, rather than a cost-effective necessity—is usually one of the first components cut from a project in the name of cost containment. The result is a country dotted with projects that meet minimal shelter requirements but fall far short of the well-planned, well-designed, and well-landscaped environments usually associated with good-quality housing.