Michigan News And Capitol Report, Week Ending Friday, July 24th, 2026

New Tax Credits, Ban On Corporation-Owned Homes Highlight New Housing Laws

(GRAND RAPIDS) – Statewide building codes and a ban on large corporations and investment funds purchasing single-family homes (HB 6074) highlight six bills Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law Tuesday in the hopes of improving Michigan's housing stock.

New, smaller-scale apartments would need only one entrance under one reform (HB 5570 and HB 5571). A new $100 million tax credit for affordable housing developers is another (SB 966). And a separate low-income housing income tax credit is a third reform (HB 5806, HB 5807).

Whitmer was joined at the signing by Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids), who said the new state housing bills signed Tuesday would be a perfect complement to the federal housing bills that also passed and would help get more housing built across the state.

“These bills are expected to bring over 2,500 new affordable homes to Michigan every year. That’s 2,500 more families going to sleep with a roof over their heads,” Brinks said.

She said the bills signed Tuesday were a direct result of bipartisan work being made in the Legislature and that it was something that would outlast the legislators who worked on it, including Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), state Reps. Joey Andrews (D-St. Joseph), Parker Fairbairn (R-Harbor Springs), Joseph Aragona (R-Clinton Township), Kristian Grant (D-Grand Rapids), Stephen Wooden (D-Grand Rapids), and Karl Bohnak (R-Negaunee).

“We can deliver real progress on the top issues facing our communities, real progress that will outlive our time in the Capitol and leave a positive ripple effect on our great state for generations to come,” Brinks said.

Michigan Housing Council Chair Chris Potterpin said 200,000 low-income families were looking for a home across the state and these bills would give a $250 million investment boost to help get the extra 2,500 homes per year built.

He also thanked Whitmer for her role in getting the package passed.

“Her administration didn’t just cheer from the sidelines either; they rolled up their sleeves. They worked intimately with the Legislature and stakeholders to ensure that this bill is built to last. No sunset,” Potterpin said.

Whitmer highlighted the bills that would “cut red tape” by modernizing building codes to keep housing projects flexible and cut construction costs by 10%. 

“I hear from Michiganders all the time who are tired of scouring Zillow without any luck,” Whitmer said.

Whitmer also spoke with reporters after the bill signing that she has been setting “aggressive” housing goals and meeting them, and would like to see more housing bills passed in the last six months of the Legislature.

“I know that the legislature is probably not going to be around a whole lot, but I remain eager to do more to help people get into affordable housing,” she said.

Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) Director Amy Hovey said she hopes the new programs will be sent to the MSHDA board for approval in October and that the first round of funding could end up going out as early as November.

Hovey said before Tuesday, the state didn’t have a housing tax credit.

“We were just leaving money at the table that the federal government was using for housing, so now we finally will be able to do that,” she said.

She said the bills would help drive down the cost of housing development and that they already help local governments with grants to update zoning laws.

CRC Flags Budget Shortfall That State Says Doesn't Exist

The Citizens Research Council of Michigan said the signed Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 budget is between $600 million to $900 million short of actual state funding, but the state says there are lapses that will return the shortfall this year to make it balance.

CRC Senior Research Associate Bob Schneider said they found a $672 million gap between the FY 2027 appropriations against the revenues being gathered for the fiscal year, but he also said the problem they found wasn’t automatically a problem, because there were items that could close that gap that were not apparent.

“There’s been no release of public information about ‘We have this issue, and here’s how we’re going to address it. Some likely solutions could be the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) Fund,” Schneider said.

He said there is close to $500 million in the SOAR balance that, if it lapses, would close the shortfall.

He also said there was stimulus fiscal recovery funding that would be able to be moved into the Department of Corrections (DOC) and Michigan State Police (MSP) that would then be able to free up other funding.

He also said there could be a supplemental on the way that would more than make up for the shortfall, which happened with the 2026 budget.

Schneider said the boilerplate funding present in the budget doesn’t have any bearing on the shortfall either, but did say the state needs to be more transparent with what they are doing with the budget.

Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget spokesperson Cole Pachucki said Michigan law requires a balanced budget and that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has passed one every year.

“Any implications that the budget is not balanced are simply false,” Pachucki said.

He said the budget was using unspent COVID contingency funding and the lapse in uncommitted SOAR funding to balance the FY ’27 budget.

Whitmer also said on Tuesday that she had to get back with the reporters who asked about the shortfall and that she had signed a balanced budget.

“I don’t want to do anyone wrong by opining without actually getting the information myself,” Whitmer said. 

Whitmer Doubles Brownfield Program To $3.2B As RenCen Redevelopment Looms

Michigan's largest brownfield redevelopment projects can now tap into twice as much state tax revenue after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation expanding the state's Transformational Brownfield Program (TBP) from $1.6 billion to $3.2 billion.

The expansion, tucked into SB 723 during the Legislature's marathon July 3 budget session, could provide a significant boost to Bedrock and General Motors as they pursue the redevelopment of Detroit's mostly vacant Renaissance Center, a complex of downtown skyscrapers.

Under the new law, a single transformational brownfield project can capture up to $300 million in state tax revenue. The program's expiration date also moves from the end of 2027 to Dec. 31, 2032.

Through “transformational brownfield projects,” awarded businesses receive checks from the state's Treasury for the income taxes on workers' payrolls and the sales and use taxes they pay during the construction process, specifically on blighted properties. 

Bedrock and General Motors are expected to be the biggest beneficiary of the expanded tax incentives, and some are questioning whether that's appropriate.

Nearly 90% of the RenCen skyscraper complex is vacant after General Motors moved out of the building at the beginning of this year. The RenCen had been the automaker's global headquarters going back to 1996, until General Motors decided to relocate to the newly built Hudson's Building on Woodward Avenue. 

The Hudson's Building was a similar redevelopment project run by Bedrock, billionaire Dan Gilbert's 15-year-old commercial real estate firm. 

James Hohman, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy's fiscal policy director, said that the program prior to SB 723's signing has not lived up to its promises. 

"I mean, the biggest deal for this program was the Hudson towers, and that helped move a company half a mile down the road, and is part of the reason they're expanding this to eliminate some of the office space that was left vacant from that move," Hohman said about the Hudson's building. 

Hohman noted that the $1.6 billion program expansion is another example of legislators establishing fiscal policy priorities outside the budget-making process. 

"This is a lot of money that we're talking about, and there's a lot of money that is going to affect the state budget. These deals can go for up to 20 years, which means that we might be tying the hands of future legislators to do something about these programs if they become ineffective and expensive," Hohman said. 

On July 22, 2025 – exactly a year prior to the governor signing SB 723 – the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, while representing the Detroit Free Press, filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Claims against the state Treasury over the program. 

In March of that year, the Detroit Free Press filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking how much Bedrock had received in tax capture payments for its "One Campus Martius expansion" project, and whether job and investment targets were being met. 

The Department denied the request, citing statutes protecting taxpayer information. 

"We filed it last year and just haven't heard back. Sometimes the wheels are pretty slow," Hohman said, finding some positive potential in SB 723. "There were some improved transparency rules in the bill, and that's a good thing because I think, both constitutionally and statutory, this should be public information, and changing the rules to make that explicit is a good thing." 

Agreeing with the free-market think thank is Democratic socialist Rep. Dylan Wegela (D-Garden City), who called SB 723 an "absurdity," benefiting the state's "richest person, Dan Gilbert." 

"GM is making billions in profits each quarter. Dan Gilbert is worth $30B and apparently has enough money to bus Cleveland fans to our Pistons' playoff games," Wegela said on Facebook Thursday, referring to Gilbert's majority ownership of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team. "They don't deserve any more of our tax money. We should fund roads, public transit, infrastructure, education, and healthcare instead." 

Grateful for the legislation was Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield, whose legacy will involve the future of Detroit's skyline. 

"As our city continues to 'Rise Higher,' these pieces of legislation restore and help provide Detroit and other cities and municipalities across the state with tools that are vital for creating more jobs, fostering more development, and improving the quality of life for Detroit residents and all Michiganders," Sheffield said in a press release. "I look forward to the continued partnership between our great City and leaders in Lansing to accomplish greater initiatives." 

Muskegon Mayor Kenneth Johnson pointed to the former Shaw Walker furniture factory, once a massive nuisance property littered with broken glass, graffiti and fragmented bricks. The site is now slated for more than 500 housing units and commercial space.

"This decades-defunct complex will soon feature more than 500 new housing units and commercial space for several small businesses. Meanwhile, overcoming the expense to redevelop a separate 100-plus acre industrial legacy site, where a paper mill operated for more than a century would not be financially possible without assistance from the State of Michigan," Johnson said. "We greatly appreciate these support mechanisms and the corresponding private sector investment of local project partners." 

Furthermore, SB 723 deals with how the state cannot allow developers to capture more than 50% of its tax expenditures unless it's spending the funding on an affordable housing agreement with the local government. Under SB 723, at least 20% of the units on the property in the agreement must qualify as affordable housing units. 

Danielle Emerson, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation's (MEDC's) public relations manager, said to the media that the program, since launching in 2018, has supported 14 projects expected to revitalize 17 million square feet of space. She linked the program to more than 8,000 new housing units, and more than $7.9 billion in private investment that's been leveraged. 

Last month, more than $270 million in TBP benefits was directed to the previous Lakeside Mall site in Sterling Heights, which has been perceived by locals as representing the death and eerie vacancy of the American shopping mall. 

Reimbursements will be received over the next 30 years.

'Relics Of The Past': Tax Break Revived To Repurpose Dead Retail

In a time of dying shopping malls and vacant drugstores, the Governor on Wednesday signed legislation so that local governments can award developers property tax cuts in exchange for transforming forgotten commercial spaces. 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this week signed SB 722 and SB 723 by Sen. Jeremy Moss (D-Bloomfield Twp.), resurrecting the Commercial Rehabilitation Act that expired at the end of last year. Under the bills, the program resurfaces with a new sunset for Dec. 31, 2035. 

Also, local governments will be able to certify property tax exemptions for 12 years after a project is completed, instead of the previous 10-year cap following a facility's completion.  

For Moss, SB 722 and SB 723 are linked to his public service origin story. While serving on the Southfield City Council from 2011 through 2014, Southfield was preparing to purchase the shuttered Northland Center mall for $2.4 million. 

As a city council member, Moss learned that a healthy shopping mall is made up of 80% national stores and 20% local and independent vendors. The Northland Center was the opposite prior to its 2015 closure, with an out-of-state owner overseeing a high turnover of shops that struggled to survive. 

"It had so many underground costs, including brownfield cleanups. This is basically a tax incentive tool to alleviate property taxes," Moss said, describing the Northland Center's relationship with the creation of the Commercial Rehabilitation Act. "There's been so many blighted, obsolete (and) contaminated sites throughout Michigan that are just so expensive to redevelop." 

The first bill Moss introduced on the issue as a state representative was to expand the sunset on the act from the end of 2015 to the end of 2020, and later voted on legislation moving that sunset again to 2025. 

The property tax exemptions come in the form of a local government, following a public hearing and vote by the body, freezing the taxable value of a building at what it was prior to rehabilitation efforts. 

When asked about vacant shopping malls and strips, Moss said, "These are relics of the past . . . This is not how people want to do commerce these days. This is not how people want to walk around the community these days.”

A huge supporter behind SB 722 and SB 723 was the Michigan Municipal League (MML). 

Jennifer Rigterink, the MML's assistant state and federal affairs director, said that because the Legislature allowed the 2025 sunset to take place, the league definitely has members who lost out on projects they were preparing to begin the certification process for. 

For example, Romulus, the Wayne County community that is home to Detroit Metro Airport, had older hotels that the city depended on the tax exemptions to revitalize, Rigterink explained. 

Rigterink sees the abatements coming in handy for shuttered drug stores, fast food restaurants and dollar stores that sometimes come and go through a community. For example, she mentioned the Rite Aid drug stores, and how all the physical stores permanently closed after the company filed for bankruptcy. 

"You could go into a Rite Aid, regardless of what community they were in, and nine times out of 10 they were set up pretty much the same way. They were built and designed very specific to that business," she said. "I can definitely concur that to come in and then re-transform that into a different space is going to cost more."