The $546,000 Door - Affordable Housing Handbook

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The $546,000 Door<br>Build America, Buy America has the right goal. For affordable housing, it raises costs deals can’t absorb and stalls the homes America needs. Here’s the fix.<br>Jun 23, 2026

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By Mike Kingsella, CEO of Up for Growth, and Chris LaGrand, Senior Vice President at Woda Cooper Companies<br>A long-awaited 52-unit affordable senior community is finally being built in Davenport, Iowa. Getting there meant clearing a milestone that a market-rate developer would never recognize: purchasing a collection of standard building components. Over six months, the construction team filed nine federal waivers, for electrical switchgear, HVAC equipment, the elevator, and door hardware. In each case the product they needed was either not made by a domestic supplier or not available at a price an affordable community could carry. Each one became a waiver, a cost increase, or both. We wish we could tell you this was one project’s bad luck. It isn’t. It’s happening to affordable housing across the country.<br>A relatively new law, “Build America, Buy America” was passed in 2021, inside the bipartisan infrastructure package. It requires that the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials in any federally funded infrastructure project be made in America. Housing built with federal dollars counts as infrastructure, so HUD programs like HOME, CDBG, and the Housing Trust Fund are covered.<br>Since HUD knew the supply chain was not ready when the law as passed, it waived the rules for its own programs and phased them in. Those waivers have now expired and the affordable deals reaching construction this year are the first to feel the effects of this requirement at full force. And, as luck would have it, they are doing so just as HUD’s waiver process has slowed to a crawl.<br>The goal of the law is sound: public dollars should strengthen domestic manufacturing and put Americans to work. But applied to affordable housing, the rule is inflationary: it makes homes more expensive to build at the moment the country needs them most. And on an affordable deal, those added costs have nowhere to hide.

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Nowhere to go but up

A market-rate developer hit with a higher bill has somewhere to put it. They can raise rents, or if the market won’t bear it, walk away from a deal that no longer makes sense. An affordable developer has no such room. The rents are capped by law, the subsidy is a fixed award, and the financing was locked in months earlier on the assumption that costs would hold. You can’t build more units to increase revenue because the regulations associated with building the units are what is driving the cost. That leaves only two options: build fewer units or a watch the deal fall apart.<br>Multiply this across every affordable deal now confronting this rule, and it stops being one project’s problem. It becomes a problem that is constraining new supply from reaching the market and it is increasing the cost of building the ones that doe. This, in a country that is already short 4 million homes. And the people who end up bearing the cost are those that can least afford it pay for it, in higher rents and longer waits for housing supply that now no longer exists.<br>One developer we know ran that math and decided to hand back their federal grant because complying with Buy America would have cost more than the grant was worth. Somehow the law we created to build more homes has now become one more reason not to build more homes.<br>To the people who finance and build this housing, a rule about door hardware and light fixtures is not just a paperwork nuisance. It is a cost with no benefit. It makes it harder to get affordable housing built. It makes it harder for hard-working people to afford to live in the communities where they go to work.<br>Build America, Buy America was meant to strengthen American supply chains. Applied to housing, it not only weakens the supply of affordable housing. It weakens the financial stability of our most important natural resource: the people who actually build America.<br>What it actually costs<br>The numbers from real projects make the case better than any argument can.<br>Door hardware. Outfitting a 40-unit building with standard imported door sets runs about $67,000. The only American-made equivalent is a hospital-grade product built to keep germs off surfaces in an operating room, and it is priced like one: $546,000. More than eight times the cost, to open and close the same doors.

The elevator. On the Davenport job, the only compliant elevator the team could find cost about $75,000 more than the standard unit. The switchgear and the HVAC told the same story: the American product existed, but only at a premium.

The hidden labor. For months, the project manager and a...