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HUD Touring the Nation, Speaking on Affordable Housing

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s [1](HUD) Secretary Dr. Benjamin Carson announced Monday that the Department will lead a bus tour across the nation focused on removing barriers to affordable housing. 

The tour—Driving Affordable Housing Across America—will begin in Louisville, Kentucky, on Wednesday, stopping in different communities for events and discussions on affordable housing. 

“In our efforts to alleviate the unnecessary regulatory barriers to housing construction and development, it’s important that we get out into local communities and hear directly from our fellow citizens who are grappling with rising housing prices and learn more about best practices to address them,” Carson said. “Families, businesses and all levels of government have concerns about the rising cost of housing, and this is an opportunity to bring those parties to the table for a discussion about how we can work together to fix the problem.”

HUD state the tour is part of Carson's work as the Chair of the White Housing Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing. The Council’s eight-member agencies are engaging with governments at the local, state, and tribal level. 

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) [2] released its 2020 priced out estimates report and it casts an ominous shadow over the future fate of home prices. Data shows that if the average price for a new home raises by just $1,000, at least 158,857 homeowners would be entirely priced out of the housing market. 

According to the report, homeowners would no longer be able to qualify for the mortgages based on their current incomes. These statistics stretched across the nation, showing that although the homeowners would have been able to quality before the increase, following the rise in home prices, they were kicked out of contention.

The report also broke down the states and metropolitan areas would be most affected by this pricing out predicament, as it varied widely across the nation. This wide-scale makes sense, as most of the factors that contributed to certain areas being priced out more than other involved the sizes of the local population living within the areas, as well as the affordability of the new homes.