NAA's Policy Outlook
Elevated demand and increased costs - for everything from insurance to taxes, to labor and materials - continue to place upward pressure on rents and strain the wallets of housing providers and our residents alike.
To help address affordability challenges for renters in the short term, and housing supply needs in the long term, the rental housing industry remains committed to responsible and sustainable policy responses to these challenges. The industry urges policymakers to resist politically expedient but flawed policies that undermine the creation of necessary housing and instead focus on solutions that balance the needs of renters and housing providers and increase access to quality, affordable housing.
Learn More About Our Top Legislative and Regulatory Priorities
2025 Legislative Priorities
Preserve expiring tax provisions. Lawmakers should promote housing investment by making permanent expiring Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions that reduced individual income tax rates, provided a 20-percent tax deduction for pass-through income and REIT dividends and doubled the estate tax exemption level.
2025 Advocate Priority
Enact housing supply tax incentives. Congress should enact incentives to boost housing supply, including those expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, establishing a Workforce Housing Tax Credit, reinvigorating Opportunity Zones and promoting the conversion of underutilized commercial property into affordable apartments.
2025 Advocate Priority
Rollback HUD's final rule requiring 30-day eviction notice for PBRA properties via the Congressional Review Act (CRA) process to prevent undue financial strain on housing providers and protect HUD-assisted renters who become increasingly unable to repay mounting rent debt as a consequence of this policy.
Adopt a national data privacy and security standard that preempts the patchwork of state laws and provides greater certainty in property operations.
Protect current tax law from onerous revenue raisers. Revenue raisers that would harm housing investment, such as those targeting carried interest and like-kind exchanges, should be rejected.
2025 Advocate Priority
Enact legislation to incentivize state and local governments to reduce barriers to development of new rental housing. Lawmakers must encourage federal investment in the preservation and production of affordable housing.
Sustainably improve housing provider participation in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program and increase affordable housing options for renters and their families by enacting the Choice in Affordable Housing Act. (S. 890/H.R. 1981) Source of income mandates are not the right policy solution to address the Program’s challenges.
2025 Regulatory Priorities
Urge HUD and FHFA's General Counsels to issue a legal opinion clarifying that the CARES Act 30-day notice requirement is no longer in effect for covered properties, restoring eviction policy to the states.
Urge FHFA to withdraw its landlord-tenant requirements for covered mortgage-backed housing through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: 30-day notice of rent increase, 30-day notice of lease expiration; and 5-day grace period from late fees, along with required changes to millions of leases.
Urge FHFA to withdraw scorecard requirements to enhance resident-centered practices at Enterprise-backed multifamily properties. FHFA and the Enterprise should not mandate landlord-tenant requirements, such as rent control, source of income mandates or just cause eviction requirements, which jeopardize operational integrity and do not serve public interest.
Urge the EPA to rescind and replace Biden-era Lead-based Paint Dust Rule, which decoupled historically coupled standards for remediation and defining a lead hazard making it impossible for housing providers to understand their compliance responsibilities.
Ensure GSE reform safeguards multifamily lending. Any action – legislative or regulatory – to release the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) from conservatorship must not harm the existing multifamily GSE infrastructure and recognize the critical differences between single family and multifamily businesses.
Urge HUD to take action on a number of regulatory items, including:
- Withdraw HUD's Final Rule requiring 30-day notice for PBRA properties (an alternative approach to CRA action).
- Strengthen important guardrails in HUD's 2020 Support Animal Guidance and Disparate Impact Rule.
- Streamline the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program. Tremendous opportunity exists to build consensus around Section 8 reforms.
- Improve HUD's NSPIRE inspections standards and protocols. HUD should focus on results over process- i.e. evaluate whether something does or does not work, instead of how it works.
- Restore pre-April 2024 income limits which set annual maximum rent increase standards for Section 8 and other federal housing programs.
Promote connectivity and repeal FCC Digital Discrimination Order. The FCC must preserve the market-based partnership model for broadband deployment across rental housing communities. To do so, the FCC should close its Multi-Tenant Environment Competition Docket, repeal or dramatically limit the Digital Discrimination Order and maintain the pro-consumer and pro-renter bulk internet model.
Urge OSHA to withdraw its rulemaking establishing a national heat safety standard across industries. In NAA's response to OSHA's request for public comment, we identified numerous operational and compliance considerations that demonstrated the proposed rule's overreach and inapplicability to the realities of the rental housing industry.
Urge the Department of Labor to rollback Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules to the framework in place prior to the 2023 final rule implementation. The prior framework has been in place since 1983 and provided consistency for rental housing operators' planning purposes.
Urge the Department of Labor to Reverse Its Overtime Rules: Drop the Department's appeal to the Texas v. United States Department of Labor (E.D. Tex. Nov. 15, 2024) decision blocking implementation of the DOL's Overtime Rules that sets minimum salary thresholds for Executive, Administrative, and Professional (EAP) staff and Highly-Compensated Employees (HCE) under the Fair Labor Standards Act for overtime exemptions and/or move to rescind the final rule.