The Biden administration plans to require new homes to be constructed to the nation’s greenest, most energy-efficient building codes to qualify for the federal loans that finance more than one-sixth of new houses sold in the United States.The rule proposed Thursday would affect at least 168,000 new homes per year, 151,000 of which would be new single-family or low-rise multifamily units. Today, those units must be built to 2009 energy codes to be eligible for loans from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Federal Housing Administration or from the Department of Agriculture. The proposal would set the most recently written code, which came out in 2021, as the new baseline.AdvertisementFewer homes would be impacted by the new proposal if more states mandate the latest energy codes on their own, as several already have and 20 more are considering doing.Federal researchers estimate that the 2021 energy codes would save 35% more energy than the currently required 2009 standard and nearly 9% more than the last version of the codes released in 2018. Adopting the 2021 code will save homeowners and renters between $972 million and $1.5 billion over time, and save ratepayers approximately $74 million per year, according to HUD’s calculations. “We’re now a big step closer to ensuring that builders of millions of new homes don’t leave residents with uncomfortable drafts and steep utility bills,” said Lowell Ungar, the federal policy director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, an advocacy group. “This step is way overdue, and now we want to see them act with urgency to finalize it. The longer it takes, the more homes are built that will need to be retrofitted later at higher cost.”The U.S. has no nationwide building code. The model codes used in all 50 states are written and updated every three years by the International Code Council, a private consortium of local governments and industry groups. Rules for adopting the latest codes vary by state and city. While Idaho hasn’t updated its code beyond the standards designed nearly two decades ago, Illinois by law implements the latest version of the energy codes within a year of their release.AdvertisementEligibility requirements for loans may be the closest thing to a national building code. Congress passed a law in 2007 ordering federal agencies to either write their own building codes — which has not yet been seriously attempted — or routinely adopt the latest model codes. The ICC, as it’s known, has updated its energy codes four times since, but regulators have followed the statute just once: In 2015 when the Obama administration hiked the requirement for HUD’s FHA loans to the 2009 code.The Biden administration said it would complete the initial steps to codify the latest energy codes by the end of 2021. Yet, as HuffPost previously reported, the White House only cleared that first hurdle in late March, in apparent violation of a law that previous administrations had also flouted. The announcement came with the news that HUD would open more than $830 million to applicants seeking money to add new insulation, electric appliances, or water heaters …

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