If this is your first time on the Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse (RBC) website, we'd like to help you find your way around. Please take a few moments to review the links that appear on the left side of this page. These will take you directly to the resources you’re most interested in; they’ll help you use this site to its fullest potential. If you’re not here for information on overcoming state and local regulatory barriers to affordable housing and need other HUD information, please go to current HUD Programs.
What is RBC?
State and local development rules and regulations often create obstacles that make it harder to build or maintain affordable (also known as 'workforce') housing. In some communities, regulations can account for as much as a third of the cost of a new home! If you've come to this site looking for answers to your regulatory reform questions, you're in the right place. Here you'll find thousands of locally developed solutions for overcoming these obstacles and barriers, all in an easy-to-use, searchable database. If a reform strategy or ordinance is in place and supporting the development of affordable, mixed-income housing in cities, states, and towns across America, there's a good chance that it will work in your community as well.
Navigating Our Site
There are many ways to navigate our site. At the top of the homepage,you'll find a "Search" box that allows you to search the database by key word. We have divided the balance of the homepage into six major sections:
Search Database allows you to search the database using any combination of the following criteria: keywords, topic areas, location, and publication type.
Counts of Barriers and Solutions contains a comprehensive list and running count of all regulatory barriers and solutions identified so far.
Newsletter contains more in-depth examination of state and local regulatory reform strategies in our newsletter, Breakthroughs.
Subscribe to RBC Newsletter provides a link to subscribe to our monthly eList message. Every other month, we use the eList to announce the most recent issue of our electronic newsletter, Breakthroughs. In the intervening months, we send out a brief "Strategy of the Month Club" email message, that notifies our eList subscribers of a new and particularly noteworthy strategy or solution that’s available in our database.
Contact Us provides links you can use to contact the Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse.
Solutions That Support Affordable Housing
Created by an Act of Congress, our site presents a list of ten categories you can use to explore over 3,500 solutions in our database. Rather than asking you to wade through lengthy ordinances, court decisions, or position papers, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you! Brief summaries are linked to more detailed descriptions, right here on our site. If you find a resource or strategy you’d like to pursue, the next link takes you off our site, to the actual state or local ordinance or publication! We’ve designed the process to be as fast and easy as possible, and as a service of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, all resources provided by the Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse, including eList subscriptions and our toll-free number (1-800-245-2691, option 4), are available free of charge.
To help you better understand the types of resources available on this website, we've included a definition for each of the main topical areas:
We’ve also built an advanced search page that allows you to combine these topic areas with other criteria to refine your search. If you wish to identify only those solutions in a particular state or local community, you can narrow your search by using the location criteria. If you want to refine your search to include only specific types of documents or records, you can do that as well. The types of documents include:
Judicial Decisions
Newspaper/Magazine Articles
Ordinances/Statutes
Research Publications/White Papers/Journal Articles
State/Local Reports
Submissions
Websites
Once you’ve made your selection, the system gives you a list of very short highlights that you can review to see if one or more of them meets your needs. If the highlights appear relevant, there’s a link that will take you to a more detailed summary of the record. The final link takes you off our site to the original (often state- or local-government-produced) document. For example, if you’re looking for language to use in crafting a new, reform-driven ordinance in your state or municipality, you can click on 'Ordinances/Statutes' in a given topic area, read through the brief summaries, and when you find one that appears suitable, go directly to the actual ordinance(s). You can then use the language in these existing ordinances as a basis for your own reform efforts. When it comes to regulatory reform that supports affordable, workforce housing, it’s often at the grass-roots level that real change takes place.
News
This section contains news on recent HUD initiatives supporting the reform of state and local regulatory barriers to affordable housing.
This Just In...
This section contains records that provide a unique or extraordinary example of regulatory reform efforts from our database. We refresh this section weekly, so check back often to see new and exciting strategies others have developed.
Sign Up
Every month, we provide members of our eList with updates on successful strategies that people have sent in to the Clearinghouse or that we have uncovered through our ongoing research. We call this our "Strategy of the Month Club," which is really just a fun way of describing the RBC eList. To sign up, just click on Join Us and send us an e-mail with the word "Subscribe" in the subject line of your message. We’ll add you to over 7,000 others who receive our monthly messages, and we won’t give your information to any outside organizations or commercial interests. If you wish to review some of our previous eList messages, you can access them here. In alternating months, subscribers also receive…
Breakthroughs The RBC Newsletter
Our bimonthly electronic newsletter, Breakthroughs, provides more in-depth coverage of reforms that state and local governments have undertaken to reduce the cost impact of regulations on affordable housing. The three articles that appear on our homepage constitute the current issue, and usually represent some of the strategies we've seen in recent weeks. You can view the list of all of our back issues on the Breakthroughs mainpage.
Contact Us
If you require assistance in finding information on our site or submitting a strategy of your own for consideration, call our toll-free helpdesk line and talk directly to knowledgeable staff who can answer your questions about regulatory reforms. The number is 1-800-254-2691, option 4. Staff is available from 8:30 AM to 5:15 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. If you would prefer to send us an e-mail, you can write to us at rbc@huduser.org.
What’s New
If you’re among the many visitors who've already spent a lot of time scouting around on our site only want to see the most recent additions to the RBC database, this page takes you to our most recent entries.. In addition to the "What's New" page, you may also want to stay informed of new regulatory reform strategies by subscribing to our monthly eList.
About Us
The HUD USER Research Information Service and Clearinghouse is your one-stop source for research and information on housing policy and programs, building technology, economic development, urban planning, and a host of other housing-related topics. HUD USER hosts the Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse website, and provides dedicated, RBC-specific Help Desk staffing during our normal hours of operation. Both HUD USER and the Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse are managed by U.S. HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). The following links will provide you with additional information about PD&R and the resources available from HUD:
Counts of Barriers and Solutions
This page contains a list of the ten barrier categories and a count of the barriers and solutions identified for each category. You can review the definition of each category by clicking on the title of the category. You can view a running list of all of the barriers or solutions for each category by clicking on the appropriate number to the left or right of the category heading.
Relevant Publications
This page contains a partial list of publications that address the issues surrounding regulatory barriers to affordable housing. Because the first section is comprised of HUD publications (which are in the public domain), we are able to provide links to the full-text versions of the documents and offer them as free downloads. In many cases, these publications are also available in printed form from HUD USER for a nominal charge by calling 1-800-245-2691, or you may order online by following this link to the HUD USER webstore. Be sure to have the full title ready when placing your order. The second list contains publications currently available as abstracts and in photocopy form. While most of the publications in this section are currently out of print, some are available for free downloading in PDF file format, while others can be secured in photocopy form for a nominal charge by calling 1-800-245-2691. The third list, under the heading Bibliographic Database, includes titles, abstracts, and publishers' citations for publications that may also be of interest, but which are not published by HUD. As a result, we're unable to provide the full-text versions. Nonetheless, the citations will help you secure the publications from their respective publishers.
Brochure
This page contains an electronic copy of our RBC brochure. We can also provide you with printed brochures for distribution at your meetings and conferences. Call 800-245-2691, option 4, to request copies.
Submit Experiences
We encourage those of you who have experience in overcoming state and local regulatory barriers to send them to us so that we may assist other ‘regulatory landscapers’ in their efforts to fight the good fight. What works in one community may work just as well or even better elsewhere, and your experiences could inspire the work of others in the field. We make it as easy as possible to send us your successes… just go to Submit Experiences and let us know what we’ve been missing!
Back to Top 
