President Biden unveiled the Housing Supply Action Plan this week, which aims to increase the supply of affordable housing in the U.S. through a number of steps. According to a statement from the Biden-Harris Administration, the plan's legislative and administrative actions "will help close America's housing supply shortfall in 5 years," and will start with a focus on the creation and preservation of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units in the next three years.
Multi-Housing News took a closer look at the plan and how it will impact the multifamily sector, specifically, in financing the needed housing stock amidst rising inflation, construction costs, and supply chain issues:
David Sebastian, senior managing director at Greystone, said the plan’s vision is “fantastic” but noted the challenge in Washington, D.C., is implementing changes to tax legislation policies that have a chance of passing a divided Congress.
“I think that the things that have the most potential impact are lowering the bond financing threshold and increasing credit allocation. Those are things that generally have to be embedded in some sort of tax credits bill and attached to a bigger piece of tax legislation,” Sebastian said.
One step that can be made to improve the LIHTC program is finalizing the ‘income averaging’ proposed rule and that can be done through the Treasury Department, Sebastian noted.
Read the full article on Multi-Housing News.