The Biden administration has announced new actions to lower housing costs for millions of Americans.
Primary among the actions is the call to Congress to pass legislation enacting nationwide rent control. President Joe Biden wants the legislation to give corporate landlords the choice between capping rent increases on existing units at 5% or losing current valuable tax breaks.
Under the president’s plan, corporate landlords, starting this year and for the next two years, would only be able to take advantage of faster depreciation write-offs if they keep annual rent increases to no more than 5%. According to the White House fact sheet, this applies to landlords with over 50 units in their portfolios, encompassing over 20 million rental units nationwide. However, it does provide an exception for new construction and substantial rehabs.
“Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: If you raise rents more than 5% on existing units, you should lose valuable tax breaks. My administration is also taking action to cut red tape and repurpose public land to build more affordable homes—including thousands of new homes in Nevada—and announcing new grants to build thousands of homes from Las Vegas to Syracuse, New York. And I’m reiterating my call for Congress to pass my plan to build 2 million new homes—to lower housing costs for good, we need to build, build, build,” said Biden while traveling in the swing state of Nevada.
This news comes after the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced a set of tenant protections for multifamily properties financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac starting at the end of February 2025.
“President Biden’s proposal to temporarily cap rent hikes to prevent rent gouging is historic,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). “Recent, unprecedented increases in homelessness in communities across the country are the direct result of equally unprecedented—and unjustified—rent hikes that occurred in the pandemic’s aftermath. Had such protections against rent gouging been in place then, many families could have avoided homelessness and stayed stably housed. But rather than waiting for Congress to advance anti-rent gouging measures after the election, President Biden can and should take action now to put in place these and other critical protections for renters living in properties with federally backed mortgages, as called for by NLIHC and renters nationwide.”
Several other industry associations criticized the proposal, saying that rent control is not the answer to the nation’s affordability challenges.
“While we appreciate the administration’s intent to address the shortage of affordable rental housing, research has consistently shown that mandatory rent control is an ineffective policy that fails to address the underlying issues of housing affordability—the fact that our nation’s housing supply has not kept pace with the needs of our growing population,” said David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference. “Rent caps don’t work and will have a chilling effect on housing supply. Exempting new construction will do nothing to change this, making clear that long-term investments in housing can be made uneconomic retroactively. It’s time to stop making policy by bumper sticker and get serious about housing production.”
National Multifamily Housing Council president Sharon Wilson Géno pointed to decades of academic research that show rent caps reduce the supply of housing and fail to aid the renters who need it the most while harming other residents.
“This legislative proposal will not create a single new unit while raising costs on the very residents it purports to help,” she said. If the administration’s goal is to lower housing costs and support residents, it would be better advised to implement policies that expand housing supply—the only real way to sustainably lower housing costs and create more housing security for renters as the Biden administration pointed out in its very own Housing Supply Action Plan. Rent control has been tried for decades and been a resounding failure. Now is the time for actual solutions, not electioneering.”
Mortgage Bankers Association president and CEO Bob Broeksmit agreed, adding that “while the odds are stacked against this proposal ever passing Congress, a federal rent control law would be catastrophic to renters and our nation’s rental housing market.”
“Increasing the supply of affordable rental housing nationwide—not politically motivated and self-defeating rent control proposals floated during election campaigns—is the best way to alleviate affordability constraints for renters,” Broeksmit noted.
Industry associations are calling on more action to increase housing supply, including the passage of the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act and the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act.
“If the Biden administration is serious about wanting to lower costs for renters, its policies should focus on increasing the rental housing supply,” said Carl Harris, a custom home builder from Wichita, Kansas, and the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders. “The best strategy to achieve this goal on the tax front is to strengthen the low-income housing tax credit, which is the best tool to finance the production of affordable rental housing.”
President Biden’s announcement included other actions around supply, including repurposing public land sustainably to enable more affordable housing as well as rehabilitating distressed housing, building more affordable housing, and revitalizing neighborhoods.
The president has called on Congress to pass the Biden-Harris Housing Plan that would build 2 million homes and provide $10,000 in mortgage relief for millions of Americans to unlock homeownership opportunities.
In addition, federal agencies are being asked to assess surplus land that can be repurposed for affordable housing sites. According to the White House, it will work with federal agencies with land disposition authorities as well as agencies to provide financing tools for housing and needed infrastructure.
For example, the Bureau of Land Management has announced new actions to create thousands of affordable housing units on its land in Nevada. It will open a public comment period on the sale of 20 acres of public land to Clark County for just $100 per acre. This would be the largest sale ever for affordable housing under the Nevada Public Lands Management Act program, and the county estimates it will enable the development of nearly 150 homes for households earning no more than 80% of the area median income. It also soon will announce a proposed below-market sale of 18 acres to the city of Henderson for additional affordable housing.
The U.S. Forest Service also is announcing plans to lease its land to build workforce housing in mountain resort areas such as Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and Ketchum, Idaho. In addition, the U.S. Postal Service, which owns over 8,500 facilities nationwide, will pilot the repurposing of surplus properties for affordable housing.
As part of this announcement, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, and General Services Administration anticipate releasing a final rule to make it easier for developers to use federal buildings and land to house the homeless.
The administration is also calling for state and local governments as well as transit agencies, public utilities, school districts, faith-based organizations, and other nonprofit institutions to evaluate if they have surplus land that might be suitable for the development of affordable housing.
