Comment by August 11

Comments are due Tuesday, August 11, 2026 — you can go straight to the comment form. For the route that does not expire with the comment window, see the § 553(e) petition materials in action/.

Record cutoff: July 12, 2026. As of that date the comment window is open. HUD’s notice proposing to renew Form HUD-27061 unchanged published June 12, 2026, at 91 Fed. Reg. 35,697, and comments are due Tuesday, August 11, 2026, on regulations.gov Docket No. HUD-2006-0214. You can go straight to the comment form at any point on this page. This page states the record through its July 12, 2026 record cutoff; check the official docket on Regulations.gov for anything later. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

In 2022, HUD proposed updating its one-page, cross-program demographic form to collect the protected-class data the Fair Housing Act names — a scope that includes disability. The form approved in 2023 collects race and ethnicity only, and no explanation for the change appears anywhere in the public record. HUD now proposes to renew the narrowed form unchanged, while still describing it as something broader than what it is. A comment filed before August 11 puts one question on a record HUD is required to evaluate: where did the disability data go?

Every statement in this graphic comes from a primary document archived in this repository or posted by the government; the sources are linked in What the record shows below.

In plain language

HUD runs housing programs that serve roughly 1.8 million households that include a person with a disability. People with disabilities have housing rights — like the right to ask for a reasonable accommodation. Proving those rights depends on records.

HUD uses a one-page form to count who its programs serve. In 2022, HUD said it would add disability to that form. In 2023, the new form came out without it. HUD never said why. Now HUD wants to keep the form the same for another three years.

Through August 11, 2026, anyone — an organization or an individual — can send HUD a public comment about this. A comment is a short public letter submitted on a government website. It takes about five minutes. HUD is required to look at every comment it receives. This page explains how organizations can file and how individuals can file.

The cost, in one case

In Ely v. Mobile Housing Board, a mother lost her family’s Section 8 voucher after asking for more time to find a unit that fit her son’s disability — and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, because she “never explained” that the extension request was connected to his disability. The disability-related basis of her request was sitting in the housing board’s own file; no record system carried it forward to the moment of decision. 605 F. App’x 846, 851–52 (11th Cir. 2015). That is what a missing record architecture does, one case at a time. The full legal argument is THE_ARGUMENT.md.

What the record shows

Four dates. Each links to the primary document.

1989. HUD promulgates 24 C.F.R. Part 121, its own data-collection regulation, whose categories include “handicap and family characteristics.” Commenters press HUD on its failure to generate such data; HUD answers that it “remains committed to that objective.” — 54 Fed. Reg. 3,232 (Jan. 1989), archived PDF

September 2022. “HUD also intends to update this form to collect protected class data as required by the Fair Housing Act and HUD regulations at 24 CFR 121.” — 87 Fed. Reg. 58,524, 58,525 (Sept. 27, 2022), archived PDF

January 2023.   (No explanation appears in the record. The 30-day notice contains no occurrence of “disability,” “handicap,” “protected class,” or “Fair Housing Act” — an absence verified word-by-word against the archived document. The only change HUD’s Supporting Statement explained was a clerical field relabeling.) — 88 Fed. Reg. 5,370 (Jan. 27, 2023), archived PDF; verification report

June 2026. The renewal notice still describes the form as collecting “race, ethnicity, and other protected class data … as required by … the Fair Housing Act” — a scope the one-page instrument does not field. The prior approval’s displayed expiration date, June 30, 2026, has passed while the renewal is pending. — 91 Fed. Reg. 35,697 (June 12, 2026); the form itself, archived PDF

And one number that runs through all of it: HUD’s burden estimate — 14,375 respondents, half an hour per response, 8,625 annual hours — is identical in the 2022 proposal, the 2023 approval, and the 2026 renewal notice. Whatever explains the narrowing, the disclosed record forecloses respondent burden as the reason.

Downstream, the missing records are measurable. In an original dataset of 1,900 federal disability fair-housing decisions, the share of the decided docket brought without a lawyer rose from 59.6% to 76.1% between a 2022–2024 window and a 2025–2026 window. And the project’s machine-based coding shows a directional pattern rather than a precise level: unrepresented plaintiffs lose, disproportionately, when the events their complaints describe never get translated into the elements courts screen for. (The classification codes answers to fixed questions; it does not independently establish the facts of any case.) In a July 2026 case-level census of every decided case, not one qualifying plaintiff-side judgment arose in a pro se case. Private enforcement does not substitute for administrative records; it depends on them. The figures, confidence intervals, and reproduction commands are in THE_ARGUMENT.md.

The ask is small

No one is asking HUD to lose anything. Every piece of what a comment requests is something the government has already said:

• Congress, 1988 — enacted express authority for HUD to issue “rules for the collection, maintenance, and analysis of appropriate data” (42 U.S.C. § 3614a) and directed annual reporting on “handicap” and family characteristics (42 U.S.C. § 3608(e)(6)), in the same statute as the disability fair-housing duties.
• HUD, 1989 — put those categories in its own regulation and committed, in the promulgation preamble, to generating the data.
• HUD, 2022 — proposed collecting it, citing the Fair Housing Act and Part 121.
• GAO, 2023 — audited HUD’s fair-housing data practices, answered HUD’s own resource-and-participation objections on the record, and noted that aggregate request-and-disposition data could signal noncompliance risk; HUD’s technical comments conceded the analytic use, and HUD’s research office acknowledged HUD could make changes to its existing data systems. GAO-23-105083, archived PDF.

A comment does not accuse HUD of anything. It asks HUD to finish what it started — or to explain, on the record, why not.

Why one comment counts

The last time this form was open for comment, in 2022, exactly one organization filed a substantive comment: SAGE (Services & Advocacy for LGBT Elders), through Jones Day (Comment No. HUD-2006-0214-0008, archived as a PDF in this repository’s Form HUD-27061 record). The narrowing then went through without public engagement.

A limited docket makes a well-supported, non-duplicative comment more useful to the administrative record, not less:

• Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, HUD must evaluate the comments it receives, 44 U.S.C. § 3506(c)(2)(A), and the 30-day submission to OMB is expected to summarize comments and respond to substantive issues raised, 5 C.F.R. § 1320.5(a)(1)(iv), § 1320.8(d).
• On a docket with a handful of comments, a substantive comment cannot disappear into a pile. Being “significant” among five comments is achievable in a way it never is among five thousand.
• Everything filed by August 11 becomes part of the administrative record that the planned rulemaking petition — and any court that ever reviews HUD’s answer — will read. Your paragraphs outlive the window.

One more thing follows from this: a comment grounded in your own experience, records, or expertise adds more to the docket than duplicative text. Identical form letters get counted; comments carrying facts only your organization or your life can supply get answered. That is why the instructions below insist on adding your own paragraph.

For organizations

About fifteen minutes of counsel time, using the published template:

1. Open the comment template. It is drafted for an organizational commenter and structured so that an unexplained renewal leaves significant comments unaddressed on the record. It asks HUD to address the 2022 proposal, the 2023 omission, § 3608(e)(6), Part 121, Section 504 and Part 8, privacy-preserving design alternatives, and the burden arithmetic.
2. Add one to three paragraphs only your organization can write. Three prompts:
   • a case from your intake, counseling, or testing files where the paper trail failed;
   • a data request you could not answer because no federal collection exists;
   • a program or policy decision your organization had to make blind.
3. Submit at the regulations.gov comment form before August 11 — paste the text, or attach it as a letterhead PDF with a condensed version pasted in the comment box (that is how the worked example below was filed). If the link does not open the form, go to the notice page and select “Comment.”

A comment does not need to be long to count. Even two paragraphs asking HUD to address the 2022–2023 change on the record, plus one paragraph of your organization’s own experience, is a valid, evaluable comment.

A worked example. The author’s own comment — filed July 6, 2026, posted July 7 as Comment No. HUD-2006-0214-0011 — is archived with a part-by-part crosswalk to the underlying research in appendices/admin_record_c/pra_comment_2026/.

Coalitions. A joint comment from a task force or coalition also works, and the template adapts to that use. If your organization is too thinly staffed to file alone, joining a coalition comment is a good second-best — and circulating this page to members may be the highest-leverage thing a coalition hub can do with it.

For individuals

You do not need a lawyer or an organization to comment. If you live in HUD-assisted housing, hold or are waiting for a housing voucher, have ever asked a housing provider for a disability accommodation — or you are a family member, caseworker, or advocate for someone who has — your experience is exactly what this docket lacks. About five minutes:

1. Open the comment form.
2. Write a few sentences. A pattern you can adapt:

I support adding disability data back to Form HUD-27061, as HUD proposed in 2022. I [live in HUD-assisted housing / hold a housing voucher / asked my housing provider for a disability accommodation]. When I [asked for an accommodation / needed proof of what I had requested], [what happened, in one or two sentences]. No federal form tracks what happened to requests like mine. I ask HUD to explain in this renewal why the disability categories proposed in 2022 are still missing — or to add them back.

1. Submit before August 11, 2026.

Before you file, please read this. Comments are published on the internet exactly as submitted, and the form itself states that the information is not confidential. Do not include your diagnosis, medical records, your address, or anything about yourself or your family that you do not want public. You can describe what happened — a request, a delay, a denial, lost paperwork — without naming any medical condition. The form also offers an “Anonymous” identity option if you do not want your name associated with your comment (choosing it means you will not get an email confirmation of your submission). The point of this whole effort is that the government should collect compliance data without exposing anyone’s private information; please hold your own comment to the same standard.

What a comment does not do

• It is not a lawsuit, and it does not join anyone else’s lawsuit.
• It does not commit you to the rulemaking petition, to litigation, or to anything after August 11.
• It does not oppose HUD. It supports a data collection HUD itself proposed in 2022, and asks the agency to engage its own authorities. Filing a PRA comment is ordinary administrative participation; organizations that receive HUD funding comment on HUD information collections routinely.
• It does not require legal perfection. HUD’s duty is to evaluate comments, including short ones.

Whether and how to file is, as with everything here, a judgment for you or for your organization and its counsel.

On the record

The official public docket is the authoritative record of filed comments in this proceeding. For orientation: the 2022 window produced one substantive comment — SAGE, through Jones Day, HUD-2006-0214-0008 — and the Note’s author filed in the 2026 window in individual capacity, HUD-2006-0214-0011. This page states the record through its July 12, 2026 record cutoff; the official docket is authoritative for the current record.

After August 11

• The 30-day window. After the 60-day period closes, HUD submits the collection to OMB and a second, 30-day comment window opens. The official docket on Regulations.gov is the authoritative source for any later development.
• The petition. The comment window closes; the petition does not. The Note’s proposed remedy is a petition under 5 U.S.C. § 553(e) asking HUD for a companion disability-data rule — a vehicle that obligates HUD to answer, on the record, within a reasonable time. Drafted templates exist in organizational and individual variants. If your organization wants to read the record behind the petition, or wants a fifteen-minute walkthrough before deciding anything, email nickgill@arizona.edu.
• The full playbook — now, next, and only-if-HUD-denies — is TAKE_ACTION.md.

Common questions

We receive HUD funding. Is commenting adversarial? A PRA comment is routine participation in a paperwork renewal, not litigation. The template’s requests are addressed to the record — they ask HUD to explain and engage — and the position they support is one HUD itself proposed in 2022. Organizations with HUD funding relationships comment on HUD collections as a matter of course. The judgment is yours and your counsel’s.

We do not have data on this. What would we even say? The absence is the comment. Describe what your organization cannot measure, cannot verify, or cannot answer because no federal collection exists — that is precisely the “practical utility” evidence the PRA process is designed to receive.

Does one comment matter? A submitted comment becomes part of the public docket. Its practical effect cannot be predicted, but it ensures that HUD receives the commenter’s record-based concerns during the pending clearance process — HUD must evaluate comments received, the docket is historically near-empty, and everything filed becomes part of the record the petition and any reviewing court will read. See Why one comment counts.

Is any of this legal advice? No. Every document here was drafted by a J.D. candidate, not an attorney, for adaptation by you or your counsel. The research is offered so that an organization’s own lawyers can evaluate it.

Who prepared these materials? The materials were prepared by the Note’s author, a J.D. candidate, and are provided with source links so readers can independently evaluate the record: every factual claim above links to a primary government document archived in this repository or posted on a government website, the Note is forthcoming in the Arizona Law Review (2026), and the dataset, methodology, and claims ledger are public.

Go deeper

• THE_ARGUMENT.md — the legal argument, compressed for lawyers.
• TAKE_ACTION.md — the time-ordered playbook: comment, petition, judicial review.
• The comment template and the filed worked example.
• The one-page memo (PDF) — formatted for forwarding to your counsel or board.
• The full repository — manuscript, appendices, data, and the site overview.

This page was drafted with LLM assistance and reviewed and approved by the Note’s author, a J.D. candidate (see the AI disclosure). It is orientation and logistics, not authority, and not legal advice; no attorney-client relationship is created by using anything on this page. Corrections are as welcome as questions: open an issue or email nickgill@arizona.edu.