Congress is poised to pass a major housing bill in a rare bipartisan moment as Republicans and Democrats scramble to show voters they are serious about addressing affordability concerns ahead of the midterms.
The House is expected to approve the legislation Tuesday, sending it to President Donald Trump’s desk. The Senate on Monday voted 85-5, across party lines, in favor of the bill, which is aimed at increasing housing supply and lowering costs.
The unexpected bipartisan agreement is driven as much by politics as it is by policy. With housing costs ranking among voters’ top economic concerns, Democrats and Republicans have found common ground on a normally partisan issue that allows both parties to show they are taking action on affordability.
“Both parties realize if no legislation is passing, it’s very hard for members to go back home and say they’ve actually done things,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime Republican strategist and formerly a top aide to then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia). “They can talk about what they want to do, and they can blame the other side for things not getting done, but there’s very little that they can point at that they’ve concretely done.”
In recent months, Congress has been mired in gridlock and partisan voting, most recently with the months-long brawls over government funding and national security policies, making the compromise on the housing bill, dubbed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, significant and unusual.
The measure would block institutional investors from buying more than 350 single-family homes, which lawmakers say would stop them from competing with families who are already struggling with high prices. It would also expand federal grant programs to provide money to cities for building new homes and eliminate an outdated federal construction rule to make manufacturing mobile homes less expensive.
Some housing economists and researchers have said they expect the legislation to have little impact when it comes to bringing housing prices down, with institutional investors owning a tiny percentage of the nation’s housing stock. Plus, most of America’s housing affordability crisis is rooted in a severe gap in the supply of homes available for purchase across the country.
Will Fischer of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called the bill “an important first step to make housing more affordable.” The measure makes it easier to build housing, preserve rural homes and renew disaster recovery assistance for three years, he said.
Still, Fischer said “much more will be needed to really solve the housing affordability crisis.” The bill “reflects the reality of what was possible to get bipartisan support for,” he said.
The cost of housing remains a top issue for Americans amid surging prices and stubbornly high mortgage rates. A Gallup poll from April found that the cost of owning or renting a home was the second-biggest concern among Americans’ top four financial problems in 2026, tied with energy costs.
Republicans and Democrats who worked on the bill acknowledge that more needs to be done to make housing more affordable nationwide.
“We didn’t get everything we want. We have more work to do there,” said Rep. Mike Flood (R-Nebraska) who helped shepherd the bill through the House along with Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Missouri).
House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill (R-Arkansas), who led negotiations alongside Rep. Maxine Waters (California), said the bill makes changes to building codes under programs overseen by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, after housing officials from red and blue states made clear that HUD programs are “impossible to effectively use due to red tape, bureaucracy, and lack of flexibility.”
The bill would eliminate a rule that requires contractors to build manufactured homes on a steel frame with wheels and an axle, and it also directs HUD to modernize its standards, which could encourage local governments to update their land-use codes, making it easier for builders to construct new homes.
Cleaver said that while the bill is the “most significant housing legislation in half a century,” it is just part of a much larger housing agenda that he said will require more work in the next Congress.
Some housing experts have criticized the institutional investor provision, which lawmakers have touted as a major victory in the bill, saying it would not address shortages in the housing supply. Institutional investors own 3 percent of single-family rentals and less than 0.5 percent of the total single-family housing stock, according to the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank.
Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former aide to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada), said he believes the legislation will not have any significant impact on how Americans feel about the economy and won’t help prove that lawmakers are concerned about affordability.
“I don’t think this bill will have any significant impact on housing and/or the economy anytime soon,” Manley said. “The reality is that this deals with discrete parts of the housing industry, but does nothing fundamentally to change the dynamic, which is that housing prices are too high.”
Regardless, for lawmakers who will be spending the summer campaigning for reelection, the legislation is a “good messaging opportunity,” said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University.
“It’s a big pressing electoral issue and Republicans need to win, they need to keep those swingy districts and states,” Binder said. “Same thing for Democrats, they need to make gains in those swingier places, and so doing something real in the middle potentially helps both.”
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