Changes might be coming… and they aren’t good.

Buried in the 1500 page bill is a very long section on the Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance program, REEP for short.

It calls for varied provisions such as “Green Guidelines” for new and existing homes, Federal Code Inspectors for those provisions, nationally cohesive building codes and a slew of programs around those items.

It doesn’t seem that bad…  right?

The guidelines aren’t mandatory, but it only takes a stroke of the pen to make the guidelines into requirements for any home that is going to have a federal guaranteed loan.  So, while a seller wouldn’t HAVE to make the upgrades… they would be locked away from the majority of mortgage programs for the buyer of their home unless they did…

And nationally cohesive building codes don’t sound that bad… until you start thinking about the wide variety of local conditions that building codes are specialized for… like deserts in Arizona, hurricanes along the southern coasts, the cold of Minnesota and earthquakes of California.  Should homes in Hawaii be insulated like those in North Dakota or Florida?  Is that a justifiable expense.  What about hurricane-proofing homes in West Virginia?  Earthquakes in Rhode Island?

But the biggest problem with the bill is that legislators didn’t have time to read the 1500+ pages before the voted on it… most STILL don’t know what is in it.