President Biden to release a Housing Supply Action Plan to ease the burden of housing costs

Posted on May 23, 2022   |  

• President Biden will release a Housing Supply Action Plan to lessen the burden of housing costs, by increasing the supply of quality housing in every community with legislative and administrative actions that will help close America’s housing supply shortfall in 5 years, beginning with the creation and preservation of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units in the next three years. 
• Under the Plan, the Administration will reward jurisdictions that have improved zoning and land-use policies with higher scores in certain federal grant processes, for the first time at scale.
• Deploy new financing tools to build and maintain more housing where financing gaps currently exist, manufactured housing (including chattel loans that the majority of manufactured housing purchasers rely on), accessory dwelling units (ADUs), 2-4 unit properties, and smaller multifamily buildings.
• Grow and enhance existing forms of federal financing, including affordable multifamily development and preservation.
• Ensure an improved state-owned supply of homes and other housing goes to the owners who will live in them or the non-profits who will rehabilitate them, not large institutional investors.
• Work with the private sector to handle supply chain challenges and improve building methods to finish construction in 2022 on the newest homes in any year since 2006.
• The President is also urging Congress to give investments in housing production and preservation in which one separate study of proposals in the House of Representatives-passed reconciliation bill found that the housing-related proposals would finance 1 million affordable homes. 
• Essential requirements, like the expansion of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and the Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit, obtained bipartisan support. 
• The 2023 Budget contains investments in housing supply that would lead to the production or rehabilitation of another 500,000 homes.
• In 2022, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) released 3 funding applications for competitive grant programs totaling $6 billion in funding that reward jurisdictions that have put in place land-use policies to promote density and rural main street renewal with higher scores in the grant process. 
• DOT will also issue updated program guidelines that will boost financial support for Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) program projects that include residential development.
• The administration included land use within the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) investment priorities. 
• EDA evaluates all project applications for its competitive grants to define the extent to which they align with EDA’s investment priorities.