Decades-old Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) programs earned a facelift in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, capturing the imagination of those urgently working to reverse an entrenched affordable housing crisis.
From new incentive-based structures for federal allocations to enhanced flexibility in how those funds are deployed, the changes are an attempt by policymakers to ease regulatory, administrative and financing barriers that have constrained single-family and multifamily construction for years, experts say.
“Where we are right now in this country with housing supply has been a long time in the making,” says Lavea Brachman, interim director of the Remaking Local Economies program at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, a...