Fifteen state attorneys general and one private entity, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), have sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in an effort to nix certain energy efficiency requirements for the construction of new homes and multi-family apartments.
Filed last Thursday, January 2, 2025, the lawsuit specifically calls out the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) and ASHRAE 90.1-2019 as the minimum energy-efficiency standards for certain single-family and multifamily housing programs, and claims these codes were implemented unconstitutionally.
NAHB claims that “regulations imposed by all levels of government” account for some 24% of the cost of new homes, studies have shown that building to the 2021 IECC can add up to $31,000 to the price of a new home and take up to 90 years for a homebuyer to realize a payback on the added cost of the home, eliminating the cost-effectiveness of the heralded energy efficiency requirements.
Tom Ward, vice president of legal advocacy at NAHB, told NMP in an interview that the trade group has "been complaining about this since they proposed it and since they finalized it.”
“We knew their numbers are not accurate, and we’re finding it in the field now," Ward said. "We’ve got members who are showing $20,000, $30,000 cost increases trying to comply with this; we’ve got members who, even if it’s not that much, they’re only finding a couple hundred dollars of savings a year in energy bills. It’s not working the way HUD and USDA say it was going to work.”
Attorneys general from Utah, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia joined the suit, arguing that the building standards present “a mandate that will do little to curb overall energy use but will exacerbate the housing affordability crisis and hurt the nation’s most vulnerable house hunters and renters.”
Some attorney-general plaintiffs cited the American dream of owning a home in individual press releases.
“Our multi-state action, in collaboration with the National Association of Home Builders, is urgently seeking a roll-back on the radical environmental agendas that, if not changed, will devastate the American dream of home ownership,” said Utah Attorney General Sean D. Reyes. Reyes termed the energy efficiency standards “unwanted and unneeded.”
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said she’d joined in the lawsuit “to stop a mandate that will hike home prices, making them too expensive for many Iowa families . . . particularly low-income and first-time homebuyers.”
Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers stated, “We have an affordability crisis in the home market” and “these codes will only make things worse by inflating costs and decreasing production of needed housing.”
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said the energy efficiency mandates are “misguided” and “yet another example of Washington overreach that hurts hardworking Americans.”
“Our lawsuit seeks to show that granting HUD and USDA authority to insure mortgages for new single-family homes and apartments only if they are built to the 2021 IECC or ASHRAE 90.1-2019 was done in an unconstitutional manner,” NAHB's press release stated.
HUD responded to a request for comment saying that the agency does not comment on current or pending litigation. A USDA Rural Development spokesperson also said they cannot comment on pending or active litigation.
For their part, HUD and USDA project that more than 161,000 new units of single-family housing and more than 17,000 new units of multi-family housing will be affected by the energy efficiency requirements every year.
