On June 26, the Biden administration announced additional funding for communities to eliminate barriers to building housing, production and launch new strategies to address local housing needs.
This effort, which was supported and encouraged by NMHC and other groups, will award $85 million in grant funding for the Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO Housing) program. PRO Housing aims to identify and remove barriers to affordable housing production and preservation, and lower housing costs.
“This move is further evidence of how housing has become a critical issue that lawmakers in both parties are taking seriously,” said NMHC President Sharon Wilson Géno. “It is encouraging that today’s announcement clearly highlights that cooperation at the Federal, state and local levels is required to increase housing supply, lower costs and expand opportunity for all. Other approaches, such as rent regulation, limit housing production and increase costs which hurts renters.”
Diving Deeper—Program Specifics + Additional Solutions
PRO Housing provides grant funding to communities actively taking steps and demonstrating progress in addressing needless local housing barriers to housing production. Winners of the PRO Housing competition will update state and local housing plans, revise land use policies, streamline the permitting process for housing construction and take other actions to create more housing-forward communities. Grants will also be used to preserve existing affordable housing units and provide development subsidies to create new affordable units.
Going forward we urge lawmakers at all levels of government to support efforts that incentivize states and localities to remove or mitigate local barriers to development of rental housing. Examples include:
- Streamline and fast track the entitlement and approval process;
- Provide density bonuses and other incentives for developers to include workforce units in their properties;
- Enable “by-right” zoning and create more fully entitled parcels;
- Encourage the use of tax abatements to spur the creation and preservation of badly needed affordable housing;
- Lower construction costs by contributing underutilized buildings and embrace new technology driven construction advancements; and
- Encourage higher density development near jobs and transportation.
Learn more about how to implement actionable solutions to address housing affordability here: https://housingtoolkit.nmhc.org
Staff Resource
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