TOP STORIES

Funding proposals released by administration and House

On May 30 the White House released a more detailed budget request than the “skinny budget” published in early May. The House Appropriations Committee issued its draft fiscal year 2026 funding bill for USDA on June 5 and began marking it up on June 11 but did not finish. The House draft bill proposes funding levels very similar to those in FY24/25, whereas the administration’s budget requests significant funding cuts. The administration would support the Section 502 guarantee program but not the direct program or self-help housing. Both would increase funds for Section 521 rental assistance, but the administration would eliminate USDA rental vouchers and reduce support for the Section 515 and Multifamily Preservation and Revitalization programs. Details are posted on HAC’s website here. At the House committee mark-up on June 11, Ranking Member Sanford Bishop (D-GA) offered an amendment to increase funding levels for several housing programs, but the change was not adopted. In the House bill, the Community Facilities Grant program would provide dozens of earmarks for specific projects, as has been the case for the last few years. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet released a draft bill or announced a markup schedule.

Neither the House nor the Senate has issued a proposed bill for HUD’s FY26 funding, although they held hearings on HUD’s budget request on June 10 and June 11, respectively. The administration’s budget request would zero out the HOME and CDBG programs, along with the competitive programs that serve Native Americans, SHOP, Rural Capacity Building, and others. Several other HUD programs – Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, Project-Based Rental Assistance, Public Housing, Section 202 elderly housing, and Section 811 housing for people with disabilities – would be combined into a block grant to states with reduced funding. Details are posted on HAC’s website here.

The budget proposes a new $100 million Rural Financial Assistance Program run by the CDFI Fund. It would also, however, eliminate funding for most of the existing CDFI programs, including Native CDFI programs.

HAC to testify before House subcommittee

The House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance is holding a hearing on June 12 titled Housing in the Heartland: Addressing Our Rural Housing Needs. HAC President and CEO David Lipsetz will be one of four witnesses.

Big Beautiful Bill’s cost estimated

While the Senate works on developing its version of the reconciliation bill, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost of the House version, named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, at $3 trillion. CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that enacting the bill would increase deficits over the 2025-2034 period by $2.4 trillion, excluding any macroeconomic or debt‑service effects, and the additional debt-service costs would total $551 billion, increasing the cumulative effect on the deficit to $3 trillion. The bill’s impact on the economy could reduce that total cost somewhat; CBO is expected to release that calculation when it is available. CBO also estimated that 10.9 million people would lose health insurance under the bill and an additional 5.1 million would lose it under other policy changes.

Call for workshop proposals: 2025 National Rural Housing Conference

The Housing Assistance Council is seeking engaging, hands-on workshop proposals for the National Rural Housing Conference to be held November 4-7 in Washington, DC. The deadline to submit your proposal is June 15. If your work advances housing or community development in rural America, we want to hear from you! Learn more about HAC workshops and how to submit a proposal here.

June is National Homeownership Month

The Federal Housing Administration has posted information and a social media toolkit.

RuralSTAT

June officially begins hurricane season in the United States. According to the most recent FEMA Risk Index, an estimated 3,193 rural and small town census tracts are at relatively high or very high risk for natural disasters. Approximately 17.6% of rural and small-town tracts have high-risk FEMA scores compared to 14.5% of tracts nationally. Source: HAC tabulations of FEMA’s National Risk Index for Natural Hazards.

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OPPORTUNITIES

Capacity building grants available for opioid responses

The Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts is accepting pre-applications for Community-Driven Reponses to Opioid Use Disorder and Overdose Mortality 2025 grants through July 2. Funding, up to $75,000 per year for up to two years, is available for community-based organizations and can be used for capacity building activities including enhancing operational effectiveness, strengthening communication, program evaluation, and fostering collaboration.

REGULATIONS AND FEDERAL AGENCIES

HUD suggests eliminating Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing requirements

HUD’s current Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing regulation requires property owners with FHA insurance or assistance from one of HUD’s Multifamily Housing programs to market their housing to people in protected categories (race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, and disability) who otherwise might not know about the housing. A proposed rule would eliminate all AFHM obligations. Comments are due July 3. In March, HUD proposed to reduce non-marketing requirements related to affirmatively furthering fair housing.

Media reports indicate strains at HUD

According to the Washington Post, HUD is redeploying workers to fill gaps created by staff departures, particularly in its Community Planning and Development offices, which administer programs such as CDBG and HOME. A Bloomberg piece says HUD’s Office of General Counsel has warned that the loss of large proportions of the department’s managers and lawyers may have raised the department’s risks of litigation as well as waste, fraud, and abuse.

Census Bureau advisory committees terminated

The Commerce Department terminated 14 advisory committees, including the 2030 Census Advisory Committee, the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations. A coalition led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote to the Secretary of Commerce in May expressing concerns about the terminations.

Deputy secretaries confirmed for USDA and HUD, USDA RD Under Secretary nominee announced

On June 10, the Senate confirmed Stephen Vaden as Deputy Secretary of USDA and Andrew Hughes as Deputy Secretary of HUD. President Trump has nominated Glen Smith to serve as Under Secretary for Rural Development. Smith is an agricultural businessman and farmer from Iowa. He serves on the boards of directors of the Farm Credit Administration and the Farm Credit System Insurance Corporation.

HUD extends HOTMA deadline for project-based rental assistance

HUD Notice H-2025-03 extends the date for some properties to comply with the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act. Properties receiving aid from the Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance, Section 202 elderly housing, and Section 811 housing for people with disabilities programs, as well as several FHA multifamily programs, will not be required to comply with new income and asset rules until January 1, 2026, rather than July 1, 2025.

PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA

Disaster information resources available

Is your organization prepared for summer disasters? A few of the many resources with information about readiness are listed here.

• HAC’s Rural Resilience website offers tools for readiness, response, and recovery, including HAC’s detailed guide, Prepare Your Organization to Respond and Recover from Natural and Man-Made Disasters.
• Shelter in the Storm: Creating Community Resilience Hubs, a June 17 webinar hosted by ReImagine Appalachia, will examine ways that communities, houses of worship, local governments, and more can be transformed into resilience hubs, which help prepare for and recover from natural disasters. These hubs can provide safe spaces, clean energy through solar panels and battery storage, and other precautions when weather events, outages, and other problems strike.
• How to Prepare for a Climate Disaster in Trump’s America is an article from Wired on how to find reliable information and keep safe during the summer heat and hurricane season.
• Prescient Warnings About Helene Didn’t Reach People in Harm’s Way. Here Are 5 Lessons for the Next Hurricane, published by ProPublica, suggests ways for state and county governments to better assist residents in emergencies.
• Climate Solutions Week: Rethinking Home, a series of pieces from NPR, covers topics such as saving on insurance by upgrading houses, elevating houses to avoid floods, the importance of community cohesion, and more.
• Federally Assisted Tenants’ Rights After a Disaster, a guide from the National Housing Law Project, provides an overview of tenants’ rights in federally assisted housing after a disaster, intended for attorneys and advocates. NHLP has scheduled a June 24 webinar that will review the guide.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency offers resources.
• The Environmental Protection Agency lists resources with an emphasis on indoor air quality.

Study examines financing for rural businesses

Rural business success is essential for thriving communities, but lower access to financial capital is helping to widen the rural-urban economic divide, according to the Center on Rural Innovation. A new report, Rural America’s Struggle to Access Private Capital, considers reasons for the disparities in access and suggests ways to overcome it. An interactive county-level map is also available online.

Rural housing conditions contribute to heat vulnerability

Headwaters Economics and the Federation of American Scientists collaborated on an analysis of the risk that extreme heat poses to rural residents, 11.5 million of whom live with high vulnerability to extreme heat. Housing, along with other factors such as infrastructure, age, and outdoor work, contributes to this vulnerability. Rural housing stock tends to be older, less weatherized, and less likely to have adequate cooling. Manufactured homes, which are far more common in rural places than in cities, tend to be among the most heat-vulnerable housing types. The report also identifies policy solutions that will protect people from rising temperatures and save lives. It cautions that strategies to address extreme heat should be designed with the infrastructure and capacity of rural communities in mind.

HAC

Case study describes success in preserving a Section 515 rental property

HAC worked with Northwest Coastal Housing, Partners for Rural Transformation, Rural Community Assistance Corporation, and others to ensure that a Section 515 rental complex in Tillamook, OR remained affordable for its residents, who had an average annual income of just $15,257. A new case study explains the process, the financing, and the many entities involved in preserving the property, Golden Eagle II.

Need capital for your affordable housing project?

HAC’s loan fund provides low interest rate loans to support single- and multifamily affordable housing projects for low-income rural residents throughout the U.S. and territories. Capital is available for all types of affordable and mixed-income housing projects, including preservation, new development, farmworker, senior and veteran housing. HAC loan funds can be used for pre-development, site acquisition, site development, construction/rehabilitation and permanent financing. Contact HAC’s loan fund staff at hacloanfund@ruralhome.org, 202-842-8600.

Please note: HAC is not able to offer loans to individuals or families. Borrowers must be nonprofit or for-profit organizations or government entities (including Tribes).

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