President Donald Trump’s appointees are looking to use federal land to increase the nation’s affordable housing sector by using undefined space to develop new properties across the country according to a Monday announcement.
Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner said they are partnering on the project through the Joint Task Force to Reduce Housing Costs and Open Access to Underutilized Federal Lands Suitable for Residential Development.
Nationally, there is a shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes for the nation’s 10.8 million plus extremely low-income families according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“HUD will work with DOI to assess the housing needs in areas where federal lands may be available yet underutilized, and implement tailored housing programs with guidance from states and localities,” Turner said in the announcement video.
“This partnership will identify underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development and streamline the land transfer process.”
Burgum chimed in sharing further benefits.
“It’ll also promote policies to increase the availability of affordable housing while balancing important environmental and land use considerations,” Burgum said.
They added that overlooked rural and tribal communities will be a focus of this joint agreement highlighting the fact that the Department of Interior would help reduce regulatory framework that outlines guidance for land transfers or leases to public housing authorities, nonprofits and local governments.
Turner has already committed to terminating the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule in February, repealing an expansion of the Fair Housing Act approved under the Obama administration to “overcome historic patterns of segregation.”
The rule’s termination will no longer require local zoning decisions to be determined after the completion of a 92-question grading tool that helps ensure federal housing funds are being used to further fair housing.
“An abundance of evidence from past eras of AFFH implementation shows that the absence of a rigorous, standardized fair housing planning framework will lead to broad variation in performance among grantees, with many grantees failing to identify or respond to even significant, commonly found problems or to document the regional fair housing impacts of their policies and activities,” National Community Reinvestment Center wrote of the rule.
“The pre-2015 AFFH framework (the widely discretionary Analysis of Impediments process) notoriously allowed for widespread neglect of fair housing planning, with numerous grantees doing little or no work to document issues, failing to produce documents on any timely cycle, and facing almost no accountability or oversight for substantive failures to AFFH or for materially inconsistent actions—and therefore rarely taking remedial action to disrupt segregation or to advance housing choice.”
Bowser’s Housing Goals
Despite conflicts with this provision, HUD and the Department of the Interior’s new measure is on par with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2019 goal of adding 36,000 new housing units and 12,000 affordable units to the District by 2025.
According to Bowser’s website tracking progress, 10,515 affordable units have already been secured meeting 88% of her target.
Turner’s federal agenda for affordable housing coincides with Bowser’s Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords Act (RENTAL Act), created to protect the District’s existing affordable housing.
The RENTAL Act, which has been highly protested, narrows the scope of the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), which grants tenants the rights to make the first offer on their building if a landlord decides to sell it and receive an offer of sales notice.
Still, Bowser is seeking to preserve nearly 8,000 units of housing, of which over 7,700 are affordable through 69 projects to provide bridge, gap, and support funding to affordable multi-family projects. The D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development has partnered with the mayor on these efforts.
“Our collective citywide commitment to affordable housing has made D.C. a national model for success. But that hard-won progress is at risk,” said Bowser.
Bowser’s actions come as federal programs supporting the upkeep of existing affordable units have been terminated under Secretary Turner. HUD terminated its $1 billion Green and Resilient Retrofit Program in March which has already promised to award funds to support upgrades at 25,000 sites across the country leaving a hole in budgets predestined to aid with repair of heating and cooling systems, floodproofing and insulation as outlined.
It was the first HUD program to focus on greenhouse gas emission reduction, energy efficiency in addition to green and healthy housing once approved by Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Bowser has highlighted the city’s efforts as a plea to preserve affordable housing from disenfranchised residents in the District while urging citizens to act in favor of her new bill.
“We now must act with similar urgency to protect the affordable housing that is home to nearly 100,000 Washingtonians and ensure our ability to build more housing,” Bowser continued. “We do that by rebalancing our housing ecosystem and leveraging the right tools, the right investments, and the right policies to meet this moment.”