Will federal legislation help housing-starved Massachusetts?

And while some advocates have praised the legislation, it mostly offers piecemeal changes as opposed to wholesale reforms.

Here are four of the bill’s biggest changes, and what they could mean in Massachusetts.

Perhaps the bill’s most notable provisions are ones that push local governments to permit more housing: the federal government’s first big swing at boosting housing production on the local level in decades.

It creates several incentive programs, including a new $200 million annual grant fund for communities that demonstrate measurable increases in housing supply. Another grant program would provide funds to help local governments create pre-reviewed templates for certain standard housing types like duplexes and townhomes, easing the permitting process.

The bill also ties a small portion of local Community Development Block Grant funding — a popular federal source of affordable housing funding — to housing production: communities that don’t build enough would lose 10 percent of their annual CDBG funding, with that money going instead to cities that build more. Boston received around $17 million in CDBG funds in the 2024 fiscal year.

In a statement, Andrew Mikula, chief housing economist at the Pioneer Institute, celebrated the housing production provisions, calling the bill “the most comprehensive supply-focused federal housing legislation in decades.”

Those changes are likely to provide a small boost for housing production in Massachusetts, though most communities likely will see little impact because the incentive programs are relatively small and only a handful of municipalities utilize CDBG funds.

Another notable provision will boost efforts to repair federally funded low-income housing.

Public housing has been chronically underfunded on both the state and federal levels for decades. After building a massive portfolio of government-funded homes for low-income people between the 1940s and 1960s, the federal government now offers just limited funding that has left many buildings in a state of chronic disrepair.

The bill expands the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which allows housing authorities to convert public housing subsidies to Section 8 vouchers and utilize loans and grants to finance big renovations of existing buildings.

The number of units that can be transitioned under the program is capped, and the federal bill will lift that cap by 100,000 nationwide, allowing more units to be repaired.

Public housing authorities in Massachusetts have increasingly used the program to rehabilitate ailing buildings, including a 100-unit high-rise in Brookline that was renovated through the program in 2023. The state has around 6,000 federally funded public housing units, and a much larger state-funded portfolio that is also in poor condition.

Mobile homes, now more commonly referred to as manufactured housing, have long been an affordable refuge for low- and middle-income families, particularly when home prices and borrowing costs are high. Some states have lately leaned into efforts to build more of those homes, and the housing bill seeks to help that along.

The federal building code that applies to manufactured homes — which are built on an assembly line — requires each unit to come with a permanent chassis with removable wheels and axles. That chassis, a costly addition, theoretically allows a manufactured home to move from place to place, though most are set on permanent foundations and often stay put.

The housing bill removes the chassis requirement, making it cheaper to build manufactured homes. Massachusetts recently began to study how to ease the pathways to manufactured home construction, and has sought to lean into other types of factory-built housing as well. The average sale price of a manufactured home here was just over $120,000 in 2024.

Some housing advocates have long decried the influence of large corporations in the nation’s housing market, as companies like Invitation Homes have bought up thousands of single-family homes in some cities in recent years.

The legislation’s most controversial provision seeks to curb those efforts, by prohibiting companies from owning more than 350 single-family homes. There are some significant carveouts: Investors who already own more than that cap won’t be forced to sell off their portfolio, and the ban doesn’t apply to new construction or multifamily housing.

The ban likely won’t have a significant effect, experts say, especially in Massachusetts, where large-scale corporate investment in single-family housing is minimal.

Economists argue that the role of corporate investors is often overstated. The rise in housing costs over the last few decades is largely driven by underbuilding. And large corporate investors own a relatively small share of the single-family homes in the US — roughly 3 percent — a proportion that’s even lower in New England.

Far more prevalent in Greater Boston are small local investors who own portfolios of five or fewer two- and three-families. The legislation does nothing to curb those investors.

Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.