(Barack Obama. Photo Credit: Britannica)
The Trump administration has reversed a housing rule from the Obama years that it says forced property owners to pay huge sums for construction problems they didn’t create.
The old policy allowed people to sue building owners over accessibility issues from the original construction, even if decades had passed.
Current owners could end up spending millions fixing problems caused by builders long gone
. Over the past five years, the government says property owners spent more than $112 million on these kinds of accessibility fixes just to refinance their mortgages.
The new rule puts a stop to that.
Now, complaints about construction defects must be filed within one year if they go to the federal housing agency, or within two years if taken to court.
After those deadlines, property owners are protected from being sued over old architectural mistakes they had nothing to do with.
Officials say the old approach backfired. It scared away lenders, made it harder to build affordable housing, and cost the industry billions.
One major lender told the government that the uncertainty about potentially unlimited liability caused them to lose more than a billion dollars in government-backed loans over four years alone.
The heart of the legal dispute is how to interpret a 1988 law.
Congress built in a one-year deadline for filing complaints.
But the Obama administration’s 2013 guidance treated ongoing accessibility problems as if they never ended, allowing complaints to be filed years or decades later.
The Trump administration says agencies don’t have the power to overturn what Congress wrote into law.
Court rulings have backed this view too.
Housing Secretary Scott Turner framed the rollback as part of bringing down housing costs.
He said the government has spent too long imposing expensive rules that drive up what people pay to buy, rent, or build homes.
The change still protects individual tenants who need changes made to their own apartments, but it stops property owners from facing massive surprise bills for construction choices made by someone else long ago.
