The White House is opening up $45 billion in federal funds to developers looking to turn big-city office buildings into homes.

The White House kicked off a multiagency push on Friday to help finance real-estate developers convert more office buildings in big cities emptied by the pandemic into affordable housing, taking aim at the nation’s housing crisis.

The initiative looks to harness an existing $35 billion in low-cost loans already available through the Transportation Department to fund housing developments near transit hubs, folding it into the Biden administration’s clean energy push.

It also opens up additional funding sources and tax incentives, offering a new guidebook to 20 different federal programs that can be tapped by developers and offers technical assistance in what can end up being tricky and expensive conversions.

A third peg of the program will see the federal government draw up a public list of buildings it owns that could be made available for sale to help bolster development.

  • quicklime
    142·
    8 months ago

    That’s correct. Now imagine the U.S. government’s perfect corporation-boosting answer to that: give billions away to developers to just go ahead and do it anyway. Anyone opposed to it gets painted as anti-housing, most people’s attention span isn’t long enough to read the details of why it’s like lighting money on fire, and as long as corporations get richer the parties in power are guaranteed another few years in charge.