Expands Rhode Island Housing’s authority to revise the qualified allocation plan to prioritize cost-efficient affordable housing production and total units, while reducing the scoring weight of non-production-related criteria.

Plain-English Summary

Rhode Island Housing is the state agency responsible for financing and supporting affordable housing projects. This bill would give Rhode Island Housing greater flexibility and authority to update the rules it uses to decide which affordable housing projects receive funding and tax credits. Specifically, it would allow the agency to change its "qualified allocation plan" — essentially the scoring system used to evaluate and rank housing development applications — to focus more on projects that produce the most homes at the lowest cost.

Under the changes this bill would allow, Rhode Island Housing could give more weight in its scoring system to factors like how many affordable housing units a project will create and how cost-efficiently it will build them. At the same time, the agency could reduce the importance of other scoring criteria that are not directly related to actually producing housing units. The goal is to shift the agency's priorities toward getting more affordable homes built faster and at a lower price per unit.

This bill would primarily affect housing developers who apply for state funding or tax credits to build affordable housing, as the scoring changes would influence which projects get approved and funded. It would also indirectly affect Rhode Island residents who need affordable housing, since the intent is to increase the overall supply of affordable homes available in the state. The bill does not require specific changes, but rather expands the agency's legal authority to make these types of adjustments to its existing rules.