One of the top legislative priorities of Republicans in both Congress and in the Trump White House is lowering the cost of housing.
Three of the legislators at the forefront of the push are Reps. French Hill (R., Ark.) — the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee (FSC) — Mike Flood (R., Neb.), and Marlin Stutzman (R., Ind.). The conservative trio joined the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, to discuss their efforts. All three lawmakers are members of the FSC, and have come at the housing issue from a variety of backgrounds.
At the core of their work, Stutzman noted, has been the bipartisan 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which he called “a monumental piece of legislation that we all worked on over time to to pass.”
Hill said that “we know how punishing inflation has been on our families since it reared its head in 2021. In fact, many people in this committee warned Chairman [Jerome] Powell, warned the Biden administration, that too much federal spending in 2020, coming out of the pandemic in early 2021, would unleash historic record high inflation. And we did that on the record, and it turned out to be true.”
“As a result,” Hill continued, “you’ve seen property and casualty insurance premiums, the cost of building a home, mortgage rates all escalate being fighting that inflation, which peaked between 9 and 10 percent at the end of the at the Biden administration. This is what Trump inherited and this is what we’ve inherited as legislators. So at the heart of that for most of our families is trying to buy a house.”
Hill noted that his committee members, like Flood, got to work with their Democratic counterparts on solving that issue. Flood, as the Chair of FSC’s Housing and Insurance Subcommittee, “worked with Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, his [Democratic] partner from Kansas City,” Hill recounted. “And the thought was, ‘what can we do in federal policy at the margin to improve housing supply, cut the cost per square foot, bring more capital to family construction and apartment construction? What can we do to cut red tape? What can we do to make local communities more competitive? Give them incentives to not have big development fees, not have increasing red tape.’ Because in the hearings that Mike’s chaired, something like a quarter of the cost of a house is connected with startup paperwork and development type expense. And in multifamily, frankly, it’s in the high 30s or 40 percent.”
Hill comes to this issue with decades of experience in the private sector. “I came to Congress from the private sector,” he explained. “I’ve been in community banking for the last quarter century, both in public companies and private companies. But I ran a company I started in the late 1990s called Delta Trust, and then I sold that business just before running for Congress and being elected in 2014.”
“I’ve been in commercial banking, investment banking, and I worked with the Treasury Department during President George H.W. Bush’s term,” Hill added. “So finance is my background, and it’s a real treat and honor as a result of that background, to be the chair of the Financial Services Committee, a real treat.”
Hill noted that in the House “we added some consensus bipartisan community banking regulatory relief. That’s tailoring because we know that our community banks, those banks under $10 billion, make six out of ten home loans in the country. Big banks are not making home construction loans. I think there’s some major regulatory challenges of that.”
“We have removed regulatory barriers for banks to make more capital available for our home builders, which increases supply, which lowers prices, which helps our young families do household formation,” Hill added. “One other comment I’d add is HUD accountability. This is a tenet of the Republican Study Committee. HUD is unaccountable, and we have crisis in public housing all across the country.” Hill tied that work into the work that Vice President JD Vance has started doing in tackling fraud as well.
“We have vice president tackling fraud,” he added. “And we tackled that in the One Big, Beautiful Bill last year, providing more scrutiny over states and how they use federal welfare dollars and how we work together to benefit our citizens who are the least fortunate, who need the most help. Well, HUD should have that same thematic and we have found one disappointing lack of oversight after another around the country, including in my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas.”
Flood, too, described how he had been “active in our state on banking issues” while he served as the Speaker of Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, “and now I’m happily where I want to be working with our chairman, who’s done a great job managing our committee.” Flood saw firsthand, he said, how the Hill-led FSC “has done more bipartisan, significant material legislation” that virtually any other committee in Congress. “I think when the dust clears on this Congress, you’re going to see a committee that has worked very hard at lawmaking, not messaging bills, lawmaking. And that’s why I’m so proud to be on this committee.”
Some of that work was inspired by an unlikely source: Ezra Klein, and the “abundance” movement that he helped inspire, Flood said.
“To get a bipartisan fix in housing at the federal level, you have to have a dance partner,” he explained. “And in in this case, something’s been happening on the left for a while. Ezra Klein, as one of the the leader thought leaders on the left, put out a book called Abundance where he basically said, the left for so many years has put out well-intentioned regulations on federal home spending, meaning our programs that are meant to help workforce housing get built, things like an environmental review, you’ve got to build American by American, you’ve got a requirement to hire the indigent, the Davis-Bacon requirements for prevailing wage. But suddenly, after time, all of these cascade into a situation where you’re spending money on compliance. That isn’t building your house.”
During the process, the bipartisan duo of Flood and Cleaver convened nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity and local elected officials of both parties, and the message they were told was clear: “we’ve got to pare back some of these regulations. And Emanuel Cleaver, to his credit, was with us and by extension, the ranking member of the whole committee, Maxine Waters, was as well. Now, did we get everything we wanted? No, but that’s a negotiation. We got enough to move this forward.”
At the end of the day, when it comes to housing, Flood said “we all want the same things. We all want an island in the kitchen. We want a big bathtub, we want a mudroom, we want a family room. And those dreams don’t go away if you have less money…Homes aren’t assets. They are personal. This is where you bring your first baby. This is where you have your first Christmas with your brand new spouse, where your kids grow up. You tuck your little ones in and you say, I’m doing my job as a parent to to create an environment where they can grow and thrive. And that’s how Americans see it, and that’s how we see it. And and quite frankly, right now, that’s how the Democrats see it. So we’re at a we’re at a good place. We just need to get the plane landed.”
One solution, Flood said, is manufactured housing. “With a manufactured home, you can have those things.” One example of a manufactured home neighborhood that Flood visited was in Hagerstown, Maryland, which he visited with Fannie Mae.
“They put together a project up there where it’s a whole neighborhood of manufactured homes, and I did not believe they were pre-made,” he said. “I got down on my hands and knees,” and then he believed it. “When you can deliver that kind of relief for the American people, I think we can all go back to our districts and say we made a sizable difference in the Americans’ ability to buy a first a home for the first time.”
At a time when partisanship consumes much of what happens in D.C., Stutzman noted that the work Hill and Flood did stands in stark contrast.
The Hill-led bill, he noted, “passed on a bipartisan basis with overwhelming vote of 396 to 13 on the floor of the House. Only 13 members of the House voted against this bill. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act is full of historic wins for the American people. Some of those included streamlining housing development, improving affordability, updating outdated HUD programs.”
Hill said that one of the reasons that Americans are in this housing supply crisis is because Congress overreacted with a lot of the Dodd-Frank provisions, and he said that he is optimistic this won’t happen this time around.
“With Dodd-Frank, and the reaction to the financial crisis, Congress wanted to have prompt action to correct what were perceived as the issues,” he explained. “But sometimes they overdo it. And one thing they did was they severely curtailed banks’ ability to be in home construction the mortgage servicing business and the mortgage origination business due to capital charges and other regulations, and even the Biden administration pointed that out.”
“If we take advantage of this unique moment in time, we will produce a housing bill signed by the President of the United States for the first time in a quarter century that has lasting, major lasting ramifications,” he said.
While Hill acknowledged that there are differences of substance with the Senate’s version, which is being led by Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) and the Banking Committee, he sounded optimistic that, with President Donald Trump’s help, the two chambers can strike an agreement.
“You really are going to see over a two to five year period upon impact of this legislation directly increasing supply,” he said.
All episodes of The Right to the Point podcast are available here.
