BIDEN IS BOOSTING US HOUSING COSTS

THE Department of Housing and Urban Development exists to boost affordable housing for Americans, yet under President Biden, HUD is issuing a new “energy-saving” rule that will instead increase the cost of building homes for federally assisted buyers, despite already skyhigh prices and a nationwide housing shortage. That HUD enacted this rule to celebrate “Earth Week” last month reveals the reason for this absurdity: Once again, the Biden administration is putting environmentalist lip service over real human beings.

You wouldn’t know this from the legacy media. Pundits, like the Biden administration itself, are spinning the rule as a cost-saving measure. Bloomberg, for instance, claims new homes built under HUD’s rule will be more efficient and so save their occupants more than $900 per year in energy bills.

But these outlets are downplaying the fact that the rule also raises the price of construction by up to

$31,000 per home. With today’s interest rates, it could take a buyer as many as 90 years to break even on that through energy savings.

Young families looking to purchase starter homes with Federal

Housing Agency mortgages will bear the brunt of this impact.

Millions of them are already struggling to save amid runaway inflation; they can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars in additional upfront costs, especially when the resultant savings won’t materialize for close to a century.

In short, HUD’s new rule is a bad deal for ordinary people, which is why I tried to block it last year.

Democrats, unfortunately, united to oppose me.

HUD’s new rule also does nothing to address the greatest problem facing homebuyers across the board: our nationwide housing shortage. The shortfall is somewhere between 4 million and 7 million units, and most of the units that are available are too expensive.

Half of America’s renters say they can’t afford rent, and an incredible 78% of would-be homeowners say they can’t afford to buy. We have to put a dent in this problem if we want the American Dream to survive.

Common sense and economics tell us an important part of the solution is increasing the housing supply. This means removing core obstacles to development, including antiquated permitting processes, skilled labor shortages, supply-chain shocks and, yes, overly stringent environmental regulations.

HUD’s new rule, by contrast, limits development by making construction more expensive.

Why is the Biden administration forcing this burdensome rule through when, as the National Association of Home Builders points out, it “runs completely counter” to the administration’s own objective of “building an additional 2 million homes”?

Simply put, the president and his Cabinet are beholden to Wall Street-based interest groups and environmentalist activists.

HUD claims it’s advancing energy efficiency on behalf of “vulnerable communities,” but it’s really throwing a bone to multinational hedge funds invested in the “green transition” — as well as the fanatics who vandalized the Constitution’s display case at the National Archives Museum to “draw attention to climate change.”

These fanatics are at odds with normal families and their desire to live the American Dream. Their ideology sees modern civilization as a cancer on the Earth and explicitly opposes new human life.

As one so-called bioethicist puts it: “Having a child imposes high emissions on the world, while the parents get the benefit. So like with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence.”

Putting aside the deep perversity of comparing human beings to consumer goods, this line of thinking is at least consistent. The higher the cost of housing becomes, the more young people will decide against having children.

As one exhausted renter recently told CNN, making do has become so expensive that “having kids will never be on the table.” It aligns perfectly with nearly every other aspect of the anti-human environmentalists’ sick agenda.

The United States, however, is not a sandbox for ideological fanatics. Our system is meant to be “of the people, by the people, for the people,” not “of the people, by the people, for the planet.”

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to increase energy efficiency. But when our leaders prioritize meeting arbitrary environmental benchmarks over solving our nation’s housing crisis and making life more affordable for normal families, you know they’re neglecting their duty.

‘ The president and his Cabinet are activists.’ beholden . . . to environmentalist