By Rebecca Picciotto

Congress on Tuesday passed its most-ambitious housing legislation since the 1980s, a package of more than 50 provisions aimed at making it easier to build homes and make housing more affordable.

The House passed the bill 358-32 with broad bipartisan support a day after the Senate voted 85-5 to approve the measure. President Trump is expected to sign it into law as soon as Wednesday.

Home builders and developers are responding mostly with a shrug.

The legislation offers no new funding for affordable-housing projects. And it is up against economic headwinds that are keeping builders from expanding the housing stock, such as elevated mortgage rates and higher construction and materials costs.

Ultimately, the bill exposes the limits of the federal government's ability to increase housing supply. Congress doesn't have the authority to change the local zoning regulations and building codes that actually determine what gets built in America and that have bogged down new-housing development for decades.

Builders, scarred by the years of local bottlenecks that have delayed and killed their projects, fear that Congress's new legislation could meet the same fate when cities and towns try to implement it.

"All of this has to be administered at the state and local levels," said Ed Brady, president and chief executive of the Home Builders Institute. "It's going to take some time for this to actually filter down, if at all."

Still, the bill known as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is at least a step in the right direction and sends the correct signals, according to housing economists.

It includes measures speeding up federal environmental reviews for certain housing projects, removing restrictions on building manufactured homes, and tying cities' federal funding to their housing production.

Aaron Pechota, the executive vice president of development at NRP Group, said there are bits and pieces of the legislation that could make a difference, such as easing the limits on what banks can invest in public-welfare projects including affordable housing. He added that eliminating federal environmental reviews would save months on certain projects.

"This is like ordering an appetizer," Pechota said. "It's not going to fill you up; it's not going to be a complete meal."

Any housing legislation must contend with the cost of living in the U.S., which has remained stubbornly high since the historic inflation of the pandemic. Housing is among the biggest pain points in voters' budgets.

Existing-home prices are nearly five times the median income, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, well above what it was in the 1990s. Sales of existing homes have been mired in their worst slump in decades.

In an attempt to respond to those voter concerns earlier this year, Trump released a flurry of different housing proposals, including a ban on large investors' buying homes, which was included in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Members of Congress have introduced other housing policy ideas.

This bill became the primary vehicle for elected officials to show voters that they are doing something to lighten the heaviest piece of their budgets.

"Democrats have been talking about affordability for a long time now. And ROAD to Housing is a way to demonstrate that," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who led the bill with a Republican, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.

The last time Congress took significant action on housing was with the passage of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit in 1986. That program became the fundamental mechanism that developers use to produce affordable housing. It has since financed roughly 4 million affordable rental units. Trump expanded the program as part of his One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act.

This latest legislative package has no new spending. That made it easier to get bipartisan support in a highly divided Congress. Warren said that many of the regulations that make housing so expensive cost the federal government zero dollars to reform.

For instance, eliminating the requirement that manufactured homes include a metal-frame chassis would, by some estimates, save up to $10,000 on each of those units.

Some local governments are well ahead of Congress. States including Montana, California and New York are already taking steps to loosen the regulations that have historically suppressed housing. Some developers hope that this new federal legislation will send a flashy signal to spur more state and local overhauls.

An earlier version of the bill included a provision that would have forced developers of some new single-family rental homes to sell their properties within seven years of constructing them. That sparked outrage in the real-estate industry and was ultimately removed from the final version of this bill.

"That was one of the best things I saw from the negotiations," Brady said.

Housing economists are preparing to watch how cities and towns react to the mishmash of provisions in this new housing package -- to see what local officials adopt and what they ignore.

"It will give researchers a chance to see if we put this hodgepodge of carrots and sticks together," said Jeanna Kenney, an economics and real-estate professor at the Villanova School of Business. "Will it add up to something?"

Write to Rebecca Picciotto at Rebecca.Picciotto@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 23, 2026 21:49 ET (01:49 GMT)

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