(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, is part of an effort to pass a bipartisan bill to increase the supply of affordable housing.
The Housing Affordability Act aims to solve the problem by increasing the Federal Housing Administration’s outdated multifamily loan limits.
In a news release announcing his bill, Gallego said that “outdated regulations are holding us back” from efforts to tackle the affordable housing crisis.
“We need to make building homes easier and cheaper,” Gallego said. “By updating a nearly two-decade-old loan limit, the Housing Affordability Act will expand access to affordable loans for building multifamily housing and ultimately bring down housing costs.”
U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., cosponsored the legislation. He said affordable housing has been a “widespread” problem in his home state and across the country.
“By making a long overdue increase to the FHA’s multifamily loan limits, we can incentivize the construction of more apartment buildings and, ultimately, increase access to housing for American families,” he said.
To address this, Gallego and McCormick said the Housing Affordability Act would amend the National Housing Act to “raise statutory loan limits and update the inflationary adjustment index” from the Consumer Price Index to the Price Deflator Index of Multifamily Residential Units Under Construction.
The senators view that index as a more accurate way to gauge the true or actual cost of multifamily housing construction.
This is one of several bipartisan bills Gallego has sponsored in recent weeks.
In April, Gallego backed a bill that would protect college students and their rights to join single-sex organizations.
S. 1225, or the Freedom of Association in Higher Education Act, includes fraternities, sororities, and off-campus clubs. It says those organizations would not face punishment or discrimination from their schools. The senator said he can’t imagine his college experience without his fraternity brothers.
Gallego, the son of immigrants from Colombia and Mexico, often slept on floors when he was growing up. A bed was not in the budget.
“It sucked, there’s really no other way to describe it,” Gallego told People magazine in December. “And when you’re poor, it hurts.”
Jeffrey D. DeBoer, president and CEO of The Real Estate Roundtable, favors the legislation. In a statement, DeBoer said that enacting this bill “would make housing more available and affordable for millions of American families” in the future.
“By increasing the Federal Housing Administration’s multifamily loan limits to more accurately reflect individual market costs, the bill introduced today by Senators Gallego and McCormick would increase apartment construction, add supply, and help bring down housing costs,” DeBoer said.
The Arizona Multihousing Association, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Multifamily Housing Council have also endorsed the bill.
