Earlier this week, President Biden released a “Housing Supply Action Plan to ease the burden of housing costs over time, by boosting the supply of quality housing in every community.”

According to a press release on the White House press page, the goal of the plan is to close the housing supply gap within five years. The plan includes legislative and administrative actions, and starts with the creation and preservation of hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units in the next three years.

According to the press release, the Housing Supply Action Plan, in conjunction with other government policies, should create aid such as rental and downpayment assistance programs, to reduce housing costs, ensure affordability, and ultimately making homeownership more more attainable for Americans.

“This is the most comprehensive all of government effort to close the housing supply shortfall in history,” the press release states. “President Biden believes the best thing we can do to ease the burden of housing costs is to boost the supply of quality housing. This means building more new homes and preserving existing federally-supported and market-rate affordable housing, ensuring that total new units do not merely replace converted or dilapidated units that get demolished.”

President Biden is encouraging Congress to pass investments into housing production and preservation, and the press release notes that “key provisions, like the expansion of LIHTC and the Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit, have received bipartisan support.”

One of the efforts within the movement to create more affordable housing that needs bipartisan support at the national level is reducing regulatory barriers to housing production, to which President Biden’s plan suggests three immediate steps: leveraging transportation funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL); integrating affordable housing into DOT Programs; and including land use within the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) investment priorities. The President and his staff are requesting that Congress to pass the Unlocking Possibilities Program and the Housing Supply Fund grants to reduce affordable housing barriers.