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The package undermines a fast-growing source of new single-family homes: build-to-rent communities.
Congress rarely manages to assemble bipartisan housing legislation of any real ambition, which makes the Senate’s recent passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act a remarkable feat. The legislative package streamlines environmental review, modernizes standards for manufactured housing and creates meaningful incentives for zoning reform — supply-side changes that housing economists have been urging for decades. It attempts to address a crisis that has priced working families out of major metropolitan areas and left younger generations with diminishing options. That makes it all the more frustrating that the bill includes a provision, Section 901, that would hollow out its core promise.
Titled “Homes Are for People, Not Corporations,” the provision requires large investors who build or purchase homes specifically for rental to sell those homes to individuals within seven years, regardless of market conditions at the time. The section’s ostensible goal is to prevent those investors — companies that own at least 350 homes — from competing against individual home buyers. But its end result will be the evisceration of one of the fastest-growing and most promising sources of new family-oriented housing in the United States today: build-to-rent communities.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Post (paywall)
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Brad Hargreaves is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the founder and editor-in-chief of Thesis Driven.