President Donald Trump’s housing department cut the final step in an environmental review process to accelerate the approval of large projects receiving federal support.
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The Department of Housing and Urban Development published an interim rule this month that removes a final layer of approval that was previously required for any multifamily project with more than 200 units or a mortgage above $5M receiving federal assistance.
The change, which goes into effect on June 22, will primarily impact affordable housing developers. A public comment period regarding the change is open through July 21.
Developers will no longer be required to get final approval from HUD clearance officers to move ahead on a project, a step that HUD argues is duplicative and unnecessarily lengthens the regulatory approval timeline.
The existing rule “has the potential to add processing time to projects that often have very tight closing deadlines. It also requires a duplicative technical assistance process where technical assistance is already available,” HUD says in the interim rule filing.
The rule requiring environmental reviews was introduced in 1971, but it wasn’t until 1996 that an additional sentence was added requiring the final approval. HUD argues that the last round of oversight isn’t required by law and repeats already completed environmental reviews.
The agency says it is amending the rule as part of the Trump administration’s broader push to slash government regulation, specifically the president’s Unleashing American Energy executive order that was among the raft of orders Trump signed to fanfare on the day of his inauguration.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner has quickly worked to reshape the department to promote the White House agenda. He vowed to cut red tape at a conference in Miami two months after he was confirmed to the post and has made good on the promise with rollbacks of rules around eviction and energy-efficiency standards.
Turner has also used the levers of housing assistance for immigration policy. In January, HUD gave landlords a month to prove roughly 200,000 tenants were eligible to receive assistance after it said it had identified 25,000 deceased renters and 6,000 “ineligible non-American tenants” on its benefits rolls. A month later, the agency announced plans to push families with mixed immigration status off of housing aid, drawing criticism from tenant advocates.
Trump also signed two executive orders in March that are aimed at boosting housing development. The first called on agencies to remove regulatory barriers that the White House says are holding back development, and the second called on Congress to ease regulations and allow community banks to underwrite more mortgages.
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