Spatial Analysis

Build Now Act (CDBG Bonus vs. Penalty)

The Build Now Act ties a community's federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding to how much it is building. This layer models, for each CDBG entitlement community, whether it would receive a funding bonus, lose 10% of its grant as a penalty, or be exempt.

This is a CommunityScale estimate built from public ACS data, not HUD's official result. HUD performs the actual calculation from non-public Census Master Address File counts, and its determinations will differ from what this layer shows. Treat this as an indication of the likely direction and category, not a final outcome.

The law

The Build Now Act is Section 213 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R. 6644, 119th Congress), the omnibus housing law that took effect on July 11, 2026. Section 213 directs the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to adjust each entitlement community's annual CDBG allocation under Section 106 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 (42 U.S.C. 5306) based on its recent housing production. The adjustment takes effect beginning with the third full fiscal year after enactment and runs through fiscal year 2043.

The goal is straightforward: reward the communities that are accelerating housing growth, and redirect a slice of funding away from those that are not.

Who it applies to

The rule applies only to CDBG entitlement communities — metropolitan cities and urban counties that receive CDBG funds directly under Section 106 (42 U.S.C. 5302). On the map, every place that is not a CDBG entitlement community is not subject to the rule and is not shown.

How the outcome is determined

For each eligible community, the Secretary computes an annualized rate of housing-unit growth over two adjacent five-year windows:

  • Current growth rate — average annual percentage change in housing units over the most recent five years.
  • Prior growth rate — the same, over the preceding five-year window.

These combine into the Housing Growth Improvement Rate (HGIR), a measure of whether the community is speeding up or slowing down its housing production:

HGIR = ( Gcurrent − Gprior ) / ( |Gcurrent| + |Gprior| )

The HGIR ranges from −1 (sharp deceleration) to +1 (sharp acceleration). The statute then applies a hard cutoff at the median HGIR of all eligible recipients:

  • Bonus — a community whose HGIR is at or above the median (or whose current growth is 4% or more, an "extremely high-growth recipient") receives an additional share of CDBG funding.
  • Penalty — a community whose HGIR is below the median has its CDBG allocation reduced by 10%. The pooled penalties fund the bonuses.

Because the cutoff is a hard threshold, there is no continuous "middle" among eligible communities: a community is either above the line (bonus) or below it (penalty).

Exempt communities

A separate group of entitlement communities is exempt — carved out of the adjustment entirely. Under the statute a community is exempt if any of the following holds:

  1. It is low-cost — both its Small Area Fair Market Rent is at or below the 60th percentile of all entitlement communities and its median home value is below the U.S. median.
  2. Its rental vacancy rate is above the national rate (a slack rental market).
  3. It has been under a federal disaster or emergency declaration in the preceding three years.
  4. It lacks the legal authority to enact or update zoning and permitting ordinances.

Exempt communities are shown in the CommunityScale green. This is a different category from a bonus or a penalty — an exempt community is not being scored at all, whereas the red and blue communities are eligible communities that landed below or above the median. Keeping exempt as its own category avoids the misreading that the neutral color means "average performance."

How CommunityScale estimates the outcome

HUD performs the official calculation from the Census Bureau's Master Address File block counts. This layer is a public-data approximation:

  • Housing units come from Census ACS Table B25001 (total housing units), annualized between the 2015–2019 and 2020–2024 five-year estimates for the current window and the 2010–2014 and 2015–2019 estimates for the prior window.
  • The entitlement list is HUD's Community Development Block Grant Grantee Areas (program year 2024), crosswalked to Census geographies (metropolitan cities to municipalities, urban counties to counties).
  • The low-cost exemption flags a community whose median home value (ACS B25077) is both below the U.S. median (about $333,000 in the 2020–2024 ACS) and at or below the 60th percentile of all entitlement communities (about $387,000). We use home value for both parts, standing in for the statute's Small Area Fair Market Rent test, because a national SAFMR-by-jurisdiction series is not readily available. The high-vacancy exemption flags a community whose rental vacancy rate (ACS B25004 ÷ B25003) is above the national rate (about 5.6% in the same vintage). These cutoffs are recomputed from the latest ACS each year, so the exact dollar and percentage thresholds move over time.
  • The disaster and no-zoning-authority exemptions are not yet modeled, so a small number of communities shown as bonus or penalty here may in fact be exempt.

Because it relies on ACS estimates rather than the Master Address File, and because the median cutoff is recomputed each year against the full eligible field, this layer indicates the direction and likely category of a community's Build Now outcome rather than a precise dollar figure.

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