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HUD Secretary Martinez Announces Housing Initiatives

Addressing the NAHB Board of Directors during January’s International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas, Mel Martinez announced several initiatives in the Administration’s fiscal year 2004 budget to increase the production of affordable housing, tear down regulatory barriers and boost the minority homeownership rate.

Budget highlights include:

• Enactment of a tax credit that would expand single-family homeownership opportunities in low-income communities.
• A $113 million increase in the department’s HOME Investment Partnership program. An estimated $2.2 billion will be provided to more than 600 state and local grantees to assist home buyers and renters by helping to finance the costs of land acquisition, new construction rehabilitation and downpayments.
• An additional $200 million to fully fund the Administration’s American Dream Downpayment Fund to help some 40,000 low-income families become home owners each year.
• Increasing the ability of public housing authorities to use Sec. 8 housing voucher funds as downpayment assistance for families who are making the transition from renting to owning.
• Increasing HUD’s Housing Counseling Grant Program from $35 million to $45 million to help an additional 250,000 individuals and families manage their finances and improve poor credit ratings in order to become home owners.

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Martinez announced to the board that his agency is creating a new Office of Regulatory Reform, which will commit an additional $2 million next year to determine the impact of regulatory barriers on the construction of affordable housing.

“We will develop promising strategies to reduce those regulatory barriers that prevent rental, higher density, mixed use and affordable housing projects from being developed in a particular community,” he said.

To that end, Martinez announced that the FHA is no longer requiring pre-approval of Planned Unit Development projects for FHA mortgage insurance on dwellings located in those developments.

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