H.R. 6644

This aggressive statutory intervention arrives as the national housing deficit officially exceeds four million units, forcing federal lawmakers to bypass paralyzed municipal governments to stimulate immediate supply. By leveraging the financial weight of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, and the Federal Housing Administration, this statutory overhaul systematically targets local zoning barriers while radically expanding the scope of federally subsidized housing programs. The prolonged high-interest rate environment sustained by the Federal Reserve has severely constrained private debt markets, effectively rendering federal subsidies and credit enhancements the primary viable engines for new multifamily development. The legislation executes a calculated shift in federal power, overriding local environmental review processes and conditioning long-standing block grants on local housing production metrics. Underlying these broad structural changes is an aggressive regulatory apparatus aimed at curbing institutional investment in single-family homes, establishing strict compliance mandates for federal mortgage insurers, and restructuring rural and multifamily housing debt. Private equity firms and massive asset managers capitalized on the post-pandemic real estate market, acquiring record shares of single-family starter homes and triggering intense bipartisan legislative backlash over the corporate consolidation of neighborhood real estate. The mechanics of this overhaul rely heavily on reshaping the Community Development Block Grant program to function as a coercive instrument for zoning reform. A central mechanism of this overhaul requires all recipients of Community Development Block Grants to construct and publicly publish a searchable database of every single parcel of undeveloped land owned by the municipality. To aggressively reshape the block grant system, the legislation legally reclassifies the direct construction of affordable housing as an eligible block grant activity, allowing municipalities to divert up to twenty percent of their federal allocations directly into physical construction. Municipalities will now see their federal funding allocations dynamically adjusted based on their housing growth improvement rate, effectively penalizing localities that fail to expand their housing supply. The coercive formula determining these block grant adjustments mathematically compares a municipality's current housing growth rate against its historic baseline to calculate a precise housing growth improvement rate. Municipalities failing to reach the national median of this metric face a punitive, mandatory reduction of their federal block grants by the lesser of ten percent or one million dollars. Jurisdictions falling below the median housing growth rate face immediate grant reductions, while high-growth outliers receive substantial bonus allocations derived from those precise penalties. Municipal bond markets will immediately price in these federal clawbacks, severely elevating the borrowing costs for exclusionary suburbs that refuse to loosen local zoning codes. To bypass local resistance to density, the legislation establishes a two hundred million dollar annual Innovation Fund specifically designed to financially reward jurisdictions that permanently eliminate off-street parking requirements and abolish minimum lot sizes. This capital is explicitly earmarked to incentivize the implementation of by-right zoning for duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes in historically restrictive opportunity areas. The eradication of off-street parking minimums directly mirrors the surging demands of the national pro-housing movement, eliminating a primary cost driver that has historically rendered dense, urban infill projects financially unviable for mid-sized developers. The Accelerating Home Building Act deploys federal capital to fund the creation of standardized, pre-reviewed architectural designs for accessory dwelling units and middle-density structures. Localities accepting this grant money must commit to expedited permitting for these specific blueprints, effectively bypassing localized architectural review boards. To accelerate physical construction, the legislation deploys aggressive environmental streamlining, drastically expanding the categories of housing development categorically excluded from National Environmental Policy Act review. Projects ranging from fifteen-unit residential buildings to massive office-to-residential conversions are now insulated from federal environmental scrutiny, provided they do not expand building footprints beyond twenty percent. Commercial real estate owners holding massive portfolios of distressed, vacant office towers will utilize this exact exemption to rapidly execute residential conversions without facing years of costly environmental litigation. Infill developments on previously disturbed parcels of five acres or less are granted statutory immunity from prolonged environmental impact studies, serving as a direct assault on local regulatory bottlenecks. Tenant-based rental assistance, supportive healthcare services, and economic development activities are permanently shielded from environmental review. Rehabilitation of one-to-four unit residential buildings, including the repair of existing wells and septic systems, is categorically excluded from federal environmental oversight. The voluntary acquisition of properties located within floodways or floodplains is fully authorized under the guise of relocating residents from federally designated high-risk areas. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is instructed to draft model code language to facilitate the permitting of point-access block residential buildings, specifically those relying on a single internal stairway for access and egress. This guidance directly challenges established fire safety doctrines by pushing states and localities to adopt single-stair codes for structures up to six stories in height. This specific structural pivot will fundamentally alter the architectural geometry of American apartment buildings, allowing developers to build family-sized, multi-bedroom units on small urban parcels that were previously impossible to develop under dual-stairway mandates. The federal government will actively coordinate with the International Code Council to embed these single-stair provisions into the International Building Code, systematically altering the baseline safety architecture of multi-family construction across the nation. Simultaneously, the Federal Housing Administration is directed to launch a sweeping Small-Dollar Mortgage Pilot Program, injecting federal capital into the origination of mortgages under one hundred thousand dollars. This initiative authorizes direct payments to mortgagees and offers outright grants to borrowers to cover down payments, title insurance, and appraisal costs, fundamentally transferring origination risk from private lenders to the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. Traditional financial institutions abandoned the small-dollar mortgage market due to low profit margins and fixed origination costs, forcing the federal government to artificially subsidize these exact loans to maintain liquidity in legacy Rust Belt and deep rural markets. The Federal Housing Commissioner is granted the authority to manipulate the terms and costs imposed by the Federal Housing Administration to incentivize the origination of these small-dollar mortgages. Lenders will receive direct technical assistance and financial incentives to target these borrowers, altering the fundamental risk calculations of private mortgage originators. The federal government will track the demographic information of these borrowers and strictly monitor the solvency risks this program introduces to the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. The statutory framework executes a parallel expansion of federal financing authority by drastically increasing the baseline statutory mortgage limits for the Federal Housing Administration's multifamily insurance programs. Per-unit lending limits across multiple sections of the National Housing Act are effectively quadrupled, ensuring the federal insurance apparatus can absorb the elevated costs of contemporary commercial development. Construction costs, primarily driven by persistent labor shortages and elevated materials pricing, have soared, forcing the federal government to radically adjust its insurance ceilings simply to keep mixed-income development afloat. Federal mortgage insurance limits will no longer rely on static congressional adjustments, as the Housing Affordability Act permanently indexes the dollar amounts for multifamily residential units to the Census Bureau's Price Deflator Index of Multifamily Residential Units Under Construction. The rural housing landscape undergoes a parallel transformation under the Rural Housing Service Reform Act, granting the Secretary of Agriculture unprecedented authority to unilaterally restructure, defer, or forgive debt for struggling multifamily properties. When rural multifamily loans mature, the federal government will preemptively intervene to decouple rental assistance contracts from debt obligations, locking owners into twenty-year restrictive use agreements to preserve affordability. The Rural Housing Service is granted sweeping new powers to fundamentally alter the demographic composition of its portfolio during loan restructuring negotiations. If a rural multifamily property experiences sustained vacancies, the federal government is authorized to permanently remove a portion of the dwelling units from their binding income restrictions, prioritizing the financial survival of the asset over absolute affordability. The Secretary of Agriculture is simultaneously handed a one million dollar annual appropriation to directly finance nonprofit organizations and housing cooperatives attempting to acquire properties in markets where affordable housing is at risk of being lost to private capital. Rural housing vouchers undergo a critical operational shift, forcing the Department of Agriculture to establish a dynamic recalculation protocol that immediately adjusts a tenant's federal subsidy if they experience a sudden reduction in income or a change in family composition. To ensure this sprawling rural apparatus functions, the Comptroller General is ordered to launch a hostile audit of the Rural Housing Service's internal technology, mapping the precise financial costs and staffing demands required to modernize its failing software architecture. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture are forced into a binding agreement to streamline rural housing development by establishing a lead-agency protocol for joint environmental impact statements. This interagency coalition must evaluate the feasibility of deploying a unified physical inspection protocol to reduce compliance burdens on developers utilizing mixed federal funding. While the legislation aggressively incentivizes new construction, it deploys a sophisticated array of traps targeting institutional capital and private landlords. A central component of this statutory matrix restricts covered large institutional investors from dominating the single-family housing market, imposing devastating civil penalties of one million dollars per violation or three times the property purchase price. This legislative strike functions as a direct wealth transfer mechanism, forcibly extracting capital from Wall Street residential portfolios to fund localized housing subsidies. These penalties are weaponized as a funding mechanism, routed directly into the HOME Investment Partnerships program to subsidize first-time homebuyers. Institutional investors are now mandated to establish dedicated renter outreach resources, field complaints regarding federal and state law violations, and submit their operational data to an annual congressional review. The statutory mandate targeting large institutional investors contains highly specific, buried exemptions that insulate certain corporate landlords from the blanket prohibition on single-family home acquisitions. Institutional capital is granted total immunity from federal penalties if the acquired properties are utilized in build-to-rent communities or if the investor executes substantial rehabilitation on severely dilapidated structures. By carving out build-to-rent communities, the legislation tacitly acknowledges that institutional capital is strictly necessary to finance the creation of net-new suburban supply, effectively redirecting Wall Street from acquiring existing inventory toward funding new master-planned developments. Corporate acquisitions are entirely exempt if the properties are leased under shared-equity home-ownership programs that report positive rental payments to credit bureaus and offer the tenant a sixty-day right of first refusal. Small landlords face their own compliance traps through the newly minted Whole-Home Repairs Act, which dangles forgivable loans for property rehabilitation but attaches severe operational restrictions. The Whole-Home Repairs Act establishes a pilot program directing federal capital through local implementing organizations to fund massive structural modifications. These funds are exclusively earmarked for addressing physical accessibility, energy efficiency, and severe habitability concerns in homes occupied by lower-income residents. Accepting these funds legally binds landlords to strict rent control metrics, capping annual rent increases at five percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, for a minimum of three years post-completion. Property owners must also guarantee lease extensions for existing tenants and surrender their right to alter tenancy terms, effectively surrendering property rights in exchange for capital improvements. Independent landlords will likely boycott this pilot program entirely, as the immediate injection of repair capital is vastly outweighed by the long-term operational paralysis of federal rent control mandates. Implementing organizations must orchestrate the distribution of these funds while navigating a labyrinth of federal accessibility standards under the Rehabilitation Act. Failure to complete the approved scope of work triggers an immediate recapture of the prorated loan or grant balance, exposing property owners and local governments to sudden federal clawbacks. Implementing organizations are authorized to divert up to five percent of the awarded capital toward workforce training programs to artificially increase the local supply of authorized home repair contractors. The HOME Investment Partnerships program undergoes a radical statutory transformation, permanently removing the expiration of a jurisdiction's right to draw from its allocated trust funds. In non-entitlement rural areas, HOME funds can now be diverted away from direct housing subsidies and utilized for broad infrastructure improvements, including the installation of public water lines, municipal sewers, and road construction, provided the infrastructure connects to subsidized housing. The legislation systematically alters the income targeting of the HOME program by raising the eligibility threshold for subsidized home-ownership from low-income limits to a full one hundred percent of the area median income. Statutory purchase price limits for these federally subsidized properties are simultaneously increased from ninety-five percent to one hundred and ten percent of the median area purchase price. By pushing income eligibility limits up to the full area median income, the federal government is officially expanding the social safety net to encompass the middle class, recognizing that traditional workforce housing is no longer accessible without state intervention. Small-scale housing developments receiving HOME capital are granted sweeping regulatory reprieves, completely exempting projects with fewer than fifty units from the localized hiring mandates of Section 3 of the Housing and Urban Development Act. The environmental review process is entirely bypassed for these programs, establishing absolute statutory exemptions from the National Environmental Policy Act for all HOME-funded new construction infill projects and developments containing fewer than fifteen units. To accelerate the deployment of HOME Investment Partnerships capital, the federal government is overriding local administrative friction by allowing properties to bypass mandatory physical inspections if they have already passed an inspection under the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program or the Rural Housing Service. While the legislation deregulates certain environmental reviews, it fiercely protects federal labor standards, explicitly attaching Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements to any public infrastructure improvements financed through the HOME program. The historic twenty-four-month holding period for Community Housing Development Organization set-asides is weaponized as a use-it-or-lose-it mandate. If these specific nonprofit funds remain uninvested for two years, the federal government will ruthlessly recapture the capital and authorize the local jurisdiction to deploy it for any general eligible housing activity, stripping the nonprofit of its exclusive statutory access. Federal regulators must execute an immediate, exhaustive audit of the HOME program to guarantee strict compliance with the domestic procurement mandates of the Build America, Buy America Act. Manufactured and modular housing providers are granted unprecedented regulatory carve-outs, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development seizing primary authority to establish construction standards, explicitly preempting conflicting state and local laws. States and municipalities are explicitly prohibited from enacting guidelines that restrict the installation of manufactured homes simply because they do not meet traditional building codes. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development asserts primary, overriding authority to establish all construction and safety standards for manufactured housing, demanding that any competing federal agency seek explicit prior approval before issuing contradictory regulations. The federal government will actively finance the study and implementation of a standardized uniform commercial code for modular homes, aiming to serialize and secure individual housing modules to streamline developer financing. This aggressive federal preemption of modular and manufactured housing codes is a direct response to the escalating costs of traditional stick-built construction, forcibly paving the way for factory-built residential units to serve as the new baseline for affordable homeownership. The federal bureaucracy is ordered to aggressively identify and dismantle internal barriers to modular home development, specifically targeting the rigid construction draw schedules that have historically locked modular developers out of federal financing. In a highly specific mandate, public housing agencies and owners of federally assisted rental units are conscripted into a Temperature Sensor Pilot Program. Property owners are required to install internet-connected ambient air temperature monitors in private tenant dwellings, capturing and retaining localized climate data and submitting themselves to rigorous federal evaluation of temperature-related compliance violations. Under the Revitalizing Empty Structures Into Desirable Environments Act, local governments are handed a powerful new funding mechanism to acquire, demolish, and remediate health hazards in abandoned properties. This specific grant program explicitly authorizes the federal government to finance the creation and expansion of permanent community land trusts and housing cooperatives, embedding long-term alternative ownership models into the local real estate market. The legislation insulates these revitalization grants from standard bureaucratic delays by granting the Secretary unilateral waiver authority to bypass nearly any statutory requirement, save for those governing fair housing, labor standards, and environmental protections. A targeted self-sufficiency pilot program establishes a powerful new safe harbor for subsidized tenants, decreeing that any increase in a participating family's earned income cannot be calculated as income or resources when determining their eligibility for other federal benefits. The legislation restricts the ability of municipalities to aggressively clear homeless encampments by tying federal Continuum of Care waivers directly to municipal enforcement behavior. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is legally prohibited from approving any regulatory waivers for a jurisdiction that relocates unhoused individuals without providing immediate, alternative permanent housing options. In an aggressive maneuver to curb hostile municipal enforcement, the Secretary is legally barred from granting homelessness funding cap waivers to any local government that clears encampments without securing immediate alternative housing for the displaced individuals. This provision strips municipalities of their primary leverage over public encampments, ensuring that local mayors can no longer utilize aggressive sweeps without simultaneously financing permanent housing solutions or risking total federal defunding. The appraisal industry is thrust into a new era of transparency, as federal regulators are compelled to construct a publicly available appraisal database that aggregates residential valuation data across multiple federal agencies. This consolidation exposes appraisers and automated valuation models to intense public and governmental scrutiny regarding their pricing methodologies and geographic coverage. This data aggregation directly targets algorithmic bias and the historic undervaluation of minority-owned real estate, providing the Department of Justice with a centralized dataset to aggressively prosecute systemic redlining within automated valuation models. Financial institutions and counseling organizations also face elevated compliance standards, as the legislation mandates strict performance reviews for housing counselors tied directly to the default rates of the borrowers they advise. Counselors whose clients exhibit elevated default rates face mandatory retesting, probationary periods, and potential suspension of their federal certification, introducing severe professional liability for consumer financial outcomes. Federal housing counseling agencies face a newly weaponized oversight regime, as the statutory framework empowers the Secretary to deny grant renewals based strictly on default rates, while simultaneously forcing a geographic redistribution of federal capital toward rural areas. Agencies targeted for termination are granted a brief, sixty-day notification window, during which they may demand an informal conference to argue that their failure to meet federal metrics was caused by external lender negligence. The federal government will impose mandatory foreclosure mitigation counseling requirements on all borrowers holding federally backed mortgages who fall thirty days delinquent. The costs of this mandatory intervention will be entirely absorbed by the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. Within the banking sector, the Community Investment and Prosperity Act systematically expands the capacity of national banks and state member banks to inject capital into public welfare investments. The statutory cap restricting these investments is raised from fifteen percent to twenty percent of a financial institution's capital and surplus. Financial regulators are now mandated to submit biennial reports detailing the precise dollar amounts, geographic locations, and structural types of these expanded welfare investments. Following any future failure of an insured depository institution, federal banking agencies are legally required to publish exhaustive post-mortem reports detailing the supervisory actions taken prior to the collapse. These reports must identify specific regulatory failures that contributed to the bank's insolvency and outline legislative recommendations to prevent similar systemic collapses. The mandate for immediate post-mortem regulatory reports is a direct statutory reaction to the sudden, cascading regional bank failures of 2023, forcing federal banking examiners to publicly document their own oversight lapses. Finally, federal banking regulators are ordered to execute a coordinated review of how newly formed financial institutions raise initial capital, specifically targeting the restrictive barriers preventing non-accredited investors from participating in the launch of de novo banks. Federal oversight of the Federal Housing Administration is tightened through mandatory congressional reporting requirements. The Secretary must submit monthly reports detailing the capital ratio of the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund directly to lawmakers. If the fund's capital ratio ever drops below statutory minimums, the Secretary is legally obligated to trigger an immediate notification protocol to Congress, ensuring real-time visibility into the solvency of the federal mortgage apparatus. The highest levels of the Department of Housing and Urban Development are subjected to intense congressional scrutiny, legally compelling the Secretary to appear annually before lawmakers to explicitly testify on the physical degradation of public housing and the precise financial solvency of the Federal Housing Administration. The legislation demands intense transparency from troubled public housing authorities by requiring federal monitors and receivers to submit detailed annual timelines projecting exactly when their federal oversight will terminate. All public housing agencies must now operate with absolute procurement transparency, publishing granular details of every vendor contract, including the identity of the selected contractor and the specific goods provided. The federal government will dispatch the Comptroller General to map the exact geographic overlap of subsidized housing and toxic waste, identifying every single public housing unit situated within one mile of a federally designated Superfund site. A parallel federal audit will ruthlessly scrutinize the operational reality of public housing agencies participating in the Moving to Work demonstration, measuring exactly how localized work requirements impact tenant earnings, homelessness rates, and bureaucratic capacity. The Comptroller General is ordered to conduct an exhaustive analysis of residential heirs property, mapping the legal vulnerabilities of family land inherited without formal documentation. This federal audit will formulate strategies to incentivize state adoption of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act to shield generational land from predatory acquisitions. The federal government will also conduct a sweeping review of the severe shortage of workforce housing, explicitly tasked with establishing a new federal definition for households earning between eighty and one hundred and twenty percent of the area median income. This analysis will design the architectural framework for entirely new federal tax credits and loan programs specifically engineered to subsidize housing for the middle class. The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 is amended to force the inclusion of military service inquiries directly on the Uniform Residential Loan Application. This structural change is designed to aggressively route eligible borrowers toward Veterans Affairs home loans, altering the standard intake protocols of the entire mortgage origination industry. When calculating income eligibility for subsidized housing, the government will categorically exclude specific disability benefits received by veterans under title 38 of the United States Code. This statutory exclusion artificially lowers the on-paper income of disabled veterans, ensuring their continuous access to heavily subsidized federal residential properties. The legislation forces the integration of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Veterans Affairs into a unified policy apparatus. These massive federal bureaucracies must execute a binding memorandum of understanding to share market data, consolidate housing research, and synchronize their regulatory frameworks. This interagency coalition is tasked with identifying and dismantling any federal laws that adversely affect the availability of new residential construction, consolidating the power of three distinct federal departments against local regulatory autonomy. Tucked at the very end of the statutory text is a categorical, sweeping prohibition on the monetary authority of the Federal Reserve. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is explicitly stripped of any legal authority to issue a central bank digital currency, or any substantially similar digital asset, without direct and explicit authorization by an Act of Congress. The explicit prohibition of a Central Bank Digital Currency reflects entrenched financial sector lobbying aimed at preventing the Federal Reserve from disintermediating commercial retail banking, ensuring that private institutions maintain complete control over consumer deposits and payment processing rails.