The House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a landmark housing bill, notching a rare bipartisan accomplishment ahead of the midterm elections and clearing the way for President Trump to sign the most significant piece of housing legislation in 36 years.
The bill’s passage, by a lopsided 358-to-32 vote, ended months of sparring between the House and the Senate over a sprawling measure that aims to tackle the housing crisis by boosting supply in a country facing an acute shortage of new homes. The Senate passed its version of the same bill Monday, by a vote of 85 to 5.
A White House official said Mr. Trump was expected to sign the bill into law on Wednesday. Passage of the legislation secured a much-needed achievement for his party months before midterm elections in which their congressional majorities are at stake. Voters have been particularly critical of the president’s handling of the economy, with only 33 percent approving of it, according to a New York Times/Siena poll last month.
The success of the bill, which almost collapsed several times amid Republican infighting over the past few months, reflected an appetite among lawmakers in both parties to address a crucial affordability issue months before they face voters.
With dozens of provisions, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act aims to touch communities across the country, addressing rural and urban needs as part of a strategy to eventually bring down housing costs. It loosens federal regulations, making it easier, faster and cheaper to build; eases lending rules; rewards communities that build; delivers aid to communities reeling from disasters; and, in a policy that proved to be one of the biggest flash points but was favored by Mr. Trump, sets new limits on the role institutional investors can play in the market.
“It is the most important and most comprehensive housing bill of this century,” said Shaun Donovan, president of Enterprise Community Partners and a former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration. “It contains dozens of provisions that, taken together, go directly at the most important housing challenge of this moment, which is our housing supply.”
What is less clear is how quickly those moves will begin to have an impact on voters facing high mortgage rates, rents and prices. Among the biggest economic concerns facing Americans is the high cost of housing, invariably a household’s biggest expense. Existing home prices are up 54 percent since 2020, and homes cost nearly five times the median income, well above historic norms, according to the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies.
For years, the housing crisis was concentrated in America’s biggest and most liberal cities, like New York City and San Francisco. But the pandemic-era housing boom pushed home prices and rents to historic highs in cities that had never experienced such pressures before, like Boise, Id., and Bozeman, Mont. That created a crisis for Republican lawmakers and a rare opportunity for bipartisan consensus in a deeply divided Congress.
“We’re in a full-blown housing crisis,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, said in an interview. “Home prices are sky high, rent is through the roof. The median age of a first-time home buyer is at an all-time high. So the pressure to move was almost irresistible. This bill got through because it is big.”
For months, Republicans in the House and Senate feuded over competing versions of the legislation, despite its broad bipartisan support. Senate leaders refused to meet with their House counterparts to hammer out the differences. And with the president indicating only muted support, G.O.P. infighting threatened repeatedly to kill the measure.
The bill also faced potent opposition by far-right lawmakers who called it a wasteful example of government overreach, and even hours before the final vote were threatening to try to derail it in the House.
But over the past two weeks, House and Senate leaders hammered out an agreement, landing on a bill that was substantially larger than any of the previous versions, addressing demands from both chambers.
“It has not been easy,” Representative Maxine Waters of California, the senior Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said in an interview. “We set out to increase our nation’s housing supply, expand homeownership, and strengthen community development programs. And even though it was difficult to agree on everything, we got it done.”
In a presidential proclamation issued earlier this month, Mr. Trump called the bill “the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country.”
Chief among the sticking points was a provision to check institutional investors, which had been crafted in negotiations among White House officials, Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who leads the Banking Committee, and Ms. Warren.
The measure prohibits corporate entities from owning more than 350 existing single-family homes, although it does not require them to sell homes purchased before the measure became law. A stricter proposal that would have required investors to sell single-family homes built explicitly as rentals after seven years was dropped; it had prompted a backlash by home builders and affordable housing advocates, who feared it would discourage new home construction.
The package presents the most significant home construction legislation since 1990, when Congress passed a landmark bill that expanded affordable housing and established a national housing policy. The new measure shores up and modernizes a key provision of that earlier legislation as it targets the country’s anemic supply of housing.
In the years since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, builders have not constructed enough homes to keep up with a growing population. The country is short several million new housing units, according to some estimates. So, home prices have continued to stay high despite weak demand because there simply aren’t enough of them. Building new homes could bring down prices by adding more supply to the market, but that will take time.
“Housing affordability won’t change overnight — it took us many years to get to this point,” said Tara Roche, who leads the housing policy initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts. “But when communities are able to build more housing, price pressures ease over time.”
The bill tackles the crisis from different angles. For example, manufactured homes, which are built in a factory and arrive at a site on a truck, will no longer have to be built on a steel chassis to meet federal standards, a change that could shave thousands of dollars of the cost of these homes, and expand the types of designs factories can build. The bill also loosens lending rules for these homes and provides grants to communities to repair existing ones, which are often cheaper and faster to build than stick-built homes.
“This bill brings new money to the table to encourage development,” Representative French Hill, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.
The bill also makes new construction of affordable housing eligible for certain federal grants; cuts requirements around environmental reviews to make it easier for communities to build faster; and offers funding for communities that are building housing to improve infrastructure.
And it loosens regulations overseeing community banks and makes it easier to get small mortgages of less than $100,000, an issue important in rural communities where housing costs are lower.
“No one component of this bill is going to be a magic wand and solve the housing affordability crisis,” said David M. Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, a housing coalition, and a former senior policy adviser at the Treasury Department. But he added that taken together, its many provisions would “make a real investment in addressing the crisis.”
