Advocacy Priorities

NAHB Front and Center on Capitol Hill

• In a sign of NAHB’s clout, the association was front and center at three congressional hearings early in this session of the new Congress.

• NAHB Chairman Alicia Huey on Feb. 8 testified before House lawmakers on the Biden administration’s new waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, calling it “fatally flawed” and urging lawmakers to direct the EPA to implement a new durable and practical definition of WOTUS.

• The next day, Chief Economist Robert Dietz testified before the Senate Banking Committee on the barriers the industry faces to increase the production of quality, affordable housing.

• Dietz said that boosting housing production is the best way to ease the affordability crisis and called on Congress to pass legislation to alleviate supply-side bottlenecks, ease burdensome federal regulations and promote careers in the skilled trades. These legislative actions, he told lawmakers, would increase home construction, expand housing inventory and lower inflation.

• In early March, Frank Murphy testified before Congress on behalf of NAHB and told lawmakers the Biden WOTUS rule’s convoluted permitting regulations would “make it more difficult for me to provide homes or apartments at a price point attainable for working families.”

• Our lobbyists continue to aggressively engage with the White House and Congress to enact solutions to resolve the housing affordability crisis.

Policy Call to Action

• To move housing and the economy to higher ground, and to achieve a healthy supply-demand balance in the marketplace, NAHB is calling on the Biden administration and Congress to take the following actions:

1. Ease supply chain bottlenecks that will allow builders to increase production of badly needed affordable housing.
2. Suspend tariffs on Canadian lumber imports into the U.S. and move immediately to enter into negotiations with Canada on a new softwood lumber agreement.
3. Replace the mortgage interest deduction with a tax credit that is targeted to lower- and middle-income Americans.
4. Improve and enhance the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit to promote the construction of sorely needed rental apartments.
5. Reassert oversight authority over rulemaking agencies and ensure that efforts to further regulate the housing industry must be subject to greater public scrutiny and based on sound data.
6. Maintain the use of voluntary consensus codes and standards for the building industry.
7. Promote and fund job training programs to prepare individuals for careers in home building and pursue immigration policies that help fill labor gaps while protecting the nation’s borders.

• Taking these pro-active steps will provide the right economic conditions for the housing sector to lead the economy forward and help ease a stubbornly elevated inflation rate that is causing economic hardship for millions of American households.