Congress has a rare opportunity to deliver real housing affordability reform. The House passed the Housing for the 21st Century Act in a 390 to 9 vote. Similarly, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89 to 10. These margins reflect broad, bipartisan support. The question is whether the final version reflects the best of both bills or whether Congress accepts flawed Senate provisions that housing providers, homebuilders, and real estate groups warned would reduce housing supply.
The legislative path should be straightforward.
Keep what works in the House bill: Title VI’s community banking reforms are essential: community banks under $10 billion in assets hold 57 percent of 1-to-4 family residential construction and development loans. The House bill cuts unnecessary red tape on community banks, encourages the creation of new local banks, and expands access to the credit needed to build more homes. It also creates an FHA pilot program for small-dollar mortgages, helping working families buy lower-cost homes that many lenders no longer serve. And by allowing safe single-stair apartment designs already common in much of the world, the bill lowers construction costs and makes it easier to build more multifamily housing.
Keep what works in the Senate bill: NEPA categorical exclusions for infill and small projects. HOME reauthorization with rural and shared equity improvements. Section 515 rural rental decoupling. Appraisal workforce expansion. These modernize federal housing programs without creating new entitlements.
Delivering the President’s promise: Section 901 is a seismic shift, the first time in modern American history that Congress would tell large investors which homes they can and cannot buy. President Donald Trump promised this in Executive Order 14376 and at the State of the Union, and the core idea — that Wall Street should not outbid families for existing single-family homes — is right. That promise should be kept.
The House must fix the build-to-rent problem created by the Senate’s language, but not necessarily their intent. The Senate bill technically exempts build-to-rent communities from the ban, then effectively reverses the exemption by requiring the homes to be sold within seven years. Build-to-rent depends on long-duration rental income to attract financing. A mandatory seven-year forced exit sale destroys the long-term business model before construction even begins. The result will be fewer communities built, higher rents on the ones that get built, and a pivot to apartments that do not add the single-family rentals families actually want.
The House version (set to be voted on next week) distinguishes between acquisition and construction. Executive Order 14376 targeted institutional buyers transferring existing homes out of family hands, not developers building new inventory from scratch. Existing stock should be off-limits to large institutional acquisition, full stop. Purpose-built new-construction (build-to-rent) should be exempt from the disposal requirement, conditioned on units being built rather than bought from existing inventory. That stops the abuse the president identified, protects the supply affordability depends on, and stands on far firmer constitutional ground than forcing involuntary divestiture.
We should admit that a well-drafted Section 901 only treats a symptom, not the root incentives. As drafted, Section 901 limits institutional ownership, but the tax code keeps producing the incentive. The tax code rewards corporate owners and penalizes individual owners. Unless structural incentives change, investor-owned housing will persist, albeit with smaller LLCs and partnerships. Equalizing that treatment requires a tax-writing exercise by Ways and Means and Senate Finance; therefore, a conference report cannot fix it. Nevertheless, Congress should commit to future reform.
On central bank digital currency (CBDC), the Senate’s CBDC approach is worse than no provision at all. Addressing CBDC in this housing affordability reform risks undermining an otherwise bipartisan collaboration and stealing the message. The bill’s statutory prohibition expires in 2030 and functions as a federal go-live date, telling the next administration exactly when the Fed may begin issuing a digital dollar with congressional acquiescence baked in. If Congress will not make the ban permanent, it should strike the provision entirely and leave the question to ordinary debate when the time comes. A temporary ban is the worst of both worlds: political cover today, a clear runway tomorrow. Make it permanent, or take it out.
Home prices have climbed more than 50 percent since 2019 while wages have grown only 22 percent. For millions of Americans, the dream of homeownership is drifting further out of reach every year. The cost of inaction is rising, and inflation and massive federal deficits continue eroding affordability.
Next week, Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) plans to bring forward the Hill-Waters version of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a package that has improved dramatically from the original Senate version. It preserves the strongest bipartisan reforms from both chambers while correcting provisions that would have reduced housing supply and increased costs. Congress should seize this opportunity and deliver for the American people.
Rep. Warren Davidson, a member of the House Financial Services, represents Ohio’s 8th District in Congress.
