“The bill Trump is referencing is the Housing, Opportunity, Mobility, and Equity (HOME) Act, sponsored in 2019 by Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.). It would attach conditions to funding from the federal Community Development and Surface Transportation block grant programs, requiring states to implement strategies for making housing more affordable and “inclusive.”
Biden’s housing platform endorses the HOME Act. It also says that he would direct his transportation and housing secretaries to identify other federal grant programs that can be amended to require states and localities to amend their zoning codes.
The HOME Act would require recipients of federal housing and transportation funds to file strategic plans and annual progress reports detailing “transformative activities” they’ve taken to “reduce barriers to housing development, including affordable housing, and increase housing supply affordability and elasticity.”
The bill offers a detailed menu of policies that states and localities could adopt to boost affordable housing production, including removing restrictions on multi-family housing, eliminating off-street parking requirements, shortening permitting timelines, and removing height limits on new construction.
It is this—encouraging new construction in tightly regulated areas—that Trump calls the death of the suburbs. It’s also an approach some free marketers have embraced, given the deregulatory nature of many, though not all, of the HOME Act’s policies.”
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“Before the president adopted his “war on suburbs” rhetoric this year, he favored a limited version of this very approach: requiring recipients of federal housing dollars to report on specific things they’re doing to deregulate their housing markets.”
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“the more leverage the federal government has over state and local governments’ land use policies, the greater the risk that leverage is used for policies that have little to do with free markets.”