The Trump administration is making it harder to hold builders who violate accessibility requirements accountable.
A new policy furthers the administration’s push to roll back fair housing laws, shortening the time period to address violations. The Housing and Urban Development’s fair housing laws’ enforcement arm told employees on Monday that complaints alleging housing law violations must be filed with the office within one year of the “allegedly unlawful” construction of a building being completed.
They framed the change as a means to cut red tape. Housing advocates say it would incentivize builders to neglect accessibility requirements that are already underenforced and, in most instances, undiscovered within the now-required one-year limit.
“This is a strong signal that HUD — and this administration — is going to turn a blind eye if you build a building not in conformance with the accessibility requirements,” Sasha Samberg-Champion, special civil rights counsel at the National Fair Housing Alliance and a former deputy general counsel for HUD, told NOTUS.
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The new guidance effectively eliminates HUD’s Obama-era interpretation of the Fair Housing Act, the law that Congress amended in 1988 to require developers to build certain multifamily units with accessible features for disabled people. The statute of limitations to report violations prior to the Obama administration varied by region due to an array of court decisions.
In 2013, HUD and the Department of Justice formalized a policy allowing individuals to file a complaint “at any time until the violation” was corrected in most cases.
The Trump administration justified its policy change in a memo, first reported by Fox News, saying the expanded interpretation of the law shifted the burden of accessibility violations onto subsequent owners. Under the 2013 policy, those new owners could be forced to pay for costly violations years after a building was completed — even if they had nothing to do with its design or construction.
A spokesperson for HUD said the guidance follows Congress’ original intent and the courts’ interpretation of the Fair Housing Act.
“Under President Trump’s and Secretary [Scott] Turner’s leadership, HUD is upholding and enforcing the civil rights of all Americans, especially the most vulnerable among us,” the spokesperson said in a statement to NOTUS. “Changes to this statute of limitations must come from Congress, not HUD.”
The department did not provide any guidance or warning to staff before issuing the new memo, which was sent at 5:30 p.m. on Monday.
A HUD employee who was granted anonymity to discuss internal policy said the department previously could assist a tenant newly moving into a building that was out of compliance with the fair housing law, even if the building was constructed 30 years ago. The department will no longer be able help in such a case, and the building owner will be shielded from any enforcement action.
To maintain a similar level of oversight going forward, the employee said, the department would have to dramatically increase staffing to make sure accessibility issues are caught immediately. The agency would also have to aggressively prosecute developers that create inaccessible housing and immediately impose rebuilding requirements within a year of completion. The department was highly unlikely to take those steps, the employee said.
“What HUD has done is say the harm is caused at the point of the construction, but from a realistic lens, the harm is really caused at the point that someone experiences the harm,” a former HUD official, granted anonymity to discuss the policy freely, told NOTUS.
Housing advocates say the change creates a massive issue for disabled tenants, who under the new policy cannot challenge violations even if they weren’t aware of the infractions within the one-year period.
“The idea that a person is not harmed by inaccessible housing because they encountered it 366 days after a certificate of occupancy is issued versus 365 days afterwards is ludicrous,” said Kate Scott, executive director of the Equal Rights Center. “It is already extremely difficult for people who have been discriminated against to enforce their fair housing rights. This memo from HUD will only make it harder.”
The guidance is the latest effort by HUD to narrow its fair housing enforcement. In September 2025, the agency withdrew eight guidance documents focused on fair housing, including criminal-records screening directives, and told staff to deprioritize disparate impact cases, which the department had used to prosecute discrimination. Earlier this year, HUD proposed eliminating the disparate impact regulations altogether.
Frank Cassidy, a former federal housing commissioner under the Trump administration, framed the policy change as a major affordability win for the administration and the lenders and developers who will no longer be “burdened” by the previous interpretation.
“HUD is restoring the statute of limitations Congress actually wrote, giving owners, lenders and developers certainty, removing barriers to FHA multifamily financing, and ultimately making it easier and less expensive to preserve and build housing,” he said.
Turner said in a statement that the change “rescinds unnecessary and expensive liabilit[ties] created by legal theories that have no basis in law.”
Housing policy experts are skeptical.
“It’s cynical that they’re eliminating a core fair housing right, and they’re trying to paint it as an affordability measure because it just won’t accomplish that,” Samberg-Champion said.
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