White House Announces New Actions to Boost Housing Supply and Lower Housing Costs
March 6, 2024
Banner image
Image
Body
Building upon the White House's Housing Supply Action Plan and Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights, the Biden-Harris administration recently announced new actions to create tens of thousands of affordable homes while promoting fairer and more transparent rental markets.
Highlights of the new actions are below. For more, read the full announcement.
- Providing new funding to support housing for low-income seniors. HUD announced the availability of $115 million in grant funding to support the development preservation of supportive housing for an estimated 1,100 units for low-income seniors through the Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly program.
- Unlocking affordable housing tax credits for states affected by recent disasters. The IRS released guidance clarifying that returned low-income housing tax credits that were allocated to disaster areas in 2021 and 2022 can be reallocated for any proposed LIHTC project.
- Releasing a first-of-its-kind $225 million funding opportunity to support manufactured housing communities. HUD announced that the application for Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement grants is now open to support the preservation and revitalization of manufactured housing communities.
- Preserving the affordability of manufactured housing communities via expanded financing options. FHA published a draft Mortgage Letter that, once finalized, will create a new program to preserve affordability for existing residents of manufactured housing communities.
- Clarifying banned non-rent fees in HUD-assisted properties. HUD released new resources clarifying HUD policies and laws that prohibit certain non-rent fees(such as application and screening fees) in its Multifamily, Public Housing and Housing Choice Vouchers/Project Based Vouchers programs.
- Providing new resources to prevent unfair and preventable evictions. HUD published a fact sheet highlighting situations in which housing providers may not evict or threaten to evict someone. In addition, HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) published policies that local and state governments can adopt to reduce eviction filings.