HousingWireHousingWire
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) on Monday unveiled its three-year plan for the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to improve housing opportunities in underserved areas.
Key pillars of the plans include bolstering access in rural communities, looking to manufactured housing as an instrument to bolster supply, and addressing liquidity needs for first-time homebuyers.
Required under separate regulatory frameworks, the FHFA submitted the plans as part of the 2025-2027 Duty to Serve (DTS) requirements and the 2025-2027 Equitable Housing Finance Plans (EHFPs).
The DTS plans aim to address a lack of liquidity across manufactured housing, affordable housing preservation and rural housing. Meanwhile, the EHFPs “contain strategies to ensure homeowners and renters in all communities have affordable and sustainable housing opportunities,” the agency explained.
FHFA Director Sandra Thompson said that these plans are designed to substantively further the mission of FHFA and the GSEs to better support mortgage borrowers and renters nationwide.
“It is critical that innovative ideas for addressing liquidity needs in underserved markets be implemented and scaled up in rural communities and other areas facing access and affordability challenges,” Thompson said.
Specific to the DTS plans, FHFA claims that they “expand liquidity to serve nearly 690,000 renter households and over 90,000 homeowner households. For the first time, the Enterprises’ Underserved Markets Plans include strategies to help communities across the entire rural market, in addition to the highest-need rural populations defined by regulation.”
Each GSE will be taking different actions to assess the potential impacts of these plans. These include six “Develop the Developer” academies from Freddie Mac, with the goal to better address the capacity for housing development in rural areas. And Fannie Mae “will focus on enabling rural Community Development Financial Institutions to access secondary markets,” the FHFA explained.
The GSEs’ plans include provisions for manufactured housing communities to “better support owners that voluntarily limit rent increases for leased pads.” The DTS plans and EHFPs are available on separate, dedicated online web portals through FHFA.
