Federal / Agency News

HUD’s Office of Multifamily Housing Programs (MFH) is re-establishing the Tenant Rental Assistance Certification System (TRACS) Forum to encourage information exchange between property owners and agents, contract administrators, state housing finance agencies, housing and community development researchers, academics, policymakers and affordable housing practitioners.

President Joe Biden sent the nominations of Mark Colón to be assistant secretary for Community Planning and Development (CPD) and Solomon Jeffrey Greene to be assistant secretary for Policy Development and Research (PD&R) within HUD to the Senate for consideration.

A policy brief, Rent Regulation for the 21st Century: Pairing Anti-Gouging with Targeted Subsidies, from the NYU Furman Center suggests pairing broad-based anti-gouging rent regulation paired with targeted subsidies as the best way to stabilize low-income renters while avoiding the drawbacks of strict, broad rent regulation and means-testing.

A policy paper for the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project proposes a set of automatic stabilizers to federal housing programs to help renters and homeowners stay in their homes during economic downturns.

HUD is prioritizing the inspection of high-risk properties (previous low inspection scores and/or have not had an inspection for a long period of time). Residents will have the ability to opt-out should they not wish to have an inspector enter their unit.

The bill would provide $172 billion to retrofit existing housing through the creation of two new grant programs to achieve carbon neutrality in public housing through workforce development and construction.

The authors find that on average, developers need to pull together 3.5 different funding sources to make a development pencil, with some developments requiring as many as 11 sources on top of tax credit equity. The average number of sources has also increased over time, in line with the rise of development costs.

The bill retains most of the provisions from the version that was introduced in the 116th Congress, with two notable exceptions in the bond arena. The minimum four percent rate floor has been removed since it was passed into law in the 2020 year-end bill. The new version of the bill lowers the 50 percent bond-financing threshold to 25 percent.

HUD’s Office of Multifamily Housing recently published a Housing Notice, “Continued Availability of Funds for COVID-19 Supplemental Payments for Properties Receiving Project-Based Rental Assistance under the Section 8, Section 202, or Section 811 Programs.”

From 2-3:30 p.m. ET on April 29 HUD’s office of Policy Development and Research will host a panel discussion on services in HUD-Assisted Housing, including services offered through HUD’s Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) and Resident Opportunities and Self-Sufficiency (ROSS) programs.

Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Rob Portman (D-OH), Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Todd Young (R-IN) along with Representatives Don Beyer (D-VA), Suzan DelBene (D-WA), Jackie Walorski (R-IN) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) introduced the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act of 2021 (AHCIA).

Last week, President Joe Biden sent the administration’s fiscal year (FY) 2022 discretionary funding request to Congress. The HUD budget requests $68.7 billion, a $9 billion or 15-percent increase from the 2021 enacted level. The funding request does not include line-by-line program requests, but rather requests for a few key HUD programs. A full budget request is expected later this spring.