In a Congress largely marked by gridlock, housing may soon be an exception. Or, if the effort to pass the current housing bill falls short, it could be yet another confirmation of federal dysfunction.
As Kim Johnson, senior director of policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), observes, “Something needs to be done on housing, and a lot of that stems from members of Congress simply hearing from their constituents.” She cautions, though, that “the trickier question has always been, What is that thing or things that need to be done?”
In this year’s Congress, housing legislation has moved quite far, with each house of Congress voting in favor of comprehensive housing legislation by overwhelming margins. On Feb. 9, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of the “Housing for the 21st Century Act” by a margin of 390–9. On March 12, the U.S. Senate passed a version of its 300-page-long 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a vote of 89–10. The passed version includes provisions from the House bill and the original Senate bill, but differs from both.
The two bills share a common limitation: no money—a far cry from the $318 billion in new spending proposed back in 2021 when Build Back Better was considered.
The current bills would authorize grant programs, but funding would have to be appropriated separately. Still, broad changes to federal housing and community development regulatory frameworks, as well as incentives for states and localities to make policy changes, could result. While this is arguably an overstatement, after the Senate vote, a New York Times reporter wrote that the “last time Congress passed housing legislation of this scale was in 1990,” when the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act established the HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME), among other provisions.
Backing the legislation are a who’s-who of YIMBY (“yes in my back yard”) and industry groups, along with the Manufactured Housing Institute and the National Association of Realtors. Additionally, many nonprofit advocates, including Enterprise, Habitat for Humanity, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the National Consumer Law Center, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, have written letters of support.
What Is Included?
One aim of both the House and Senate housing bills is to make it easier to build housing through provisions that would change regulations to reduce housing construction costs and/or free up funds from existing government programs. Some of the measures related to this that appear in both bills would:
- Incentivize local communities to support land use reforms that make housing construction easier by giving them priority in accessing competitive federal grant money if they add density bonuses and similar measures.
- Increase the cap on “public welfare investments” from 15 percent of a bank’s capital and surplus to 20 percent to help boost available affordable housing financing by banks.
- Eliminate the chassis requirement for manufacturing housing, a measure supported by low-income housing groups to reduce housing construction costs.
- Revise community development block grant (CDBG) rules to make it easier to use CDBG funds for housing construction.
- Reduce environmental review requirements for small and infill housing projects to speed construction and reduce costs.
- Authorize a competitive grant program to support local governments and tribes that demonstrate measurable increases in housing supply, incentivizing reforms such as streamlined permitting, density bonuses, and zoning changes.
In addition to these supply-oriented measures, the legislation would also permanently reauthorize HOME, while instituting modest changes to it, including expanding eligibility for homeownership subsidies to families earning up to 100 percent of area median income.
Some measures are included in one bill but not in the other. The House bill, for instance, includes many sections in Title 6 on community banking reforms to encourage more housing lending, as well as a provision to create an eviction helpline at HUD. A “dear colleague” letter from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., details some of the House measures, such as the eviction hotline, that did not make it into the Senate bill.
The passed Senate version, for its part, offers a broad range of additional measures. “This isn’t comprehensive housing legislation,” says David Sanchez, senior vice president of housing strategy at ROC USA, a national nonprofit that supports resident-owned manufactured housing communities. The approach of Senate bill authors Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sanchez says, is more to “give everybody a little bit of what they were asking for.”
For advocates of manufactured housing, along with removing the chassis requirement, an important provision in the Senate bill is the reauthorization of the Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement, a grant program that received $225 million in funding during the Biden administration to support manufacturing housing rehabilitation. Another provision authorizes a pilot whole-home repairs program with grants and forgivable loans to address repair needs and health hazards, helping to stabilize aging housing stock. (Rehab and repair programs can also be cast as housing supply measures, as they prevent loss of housing, although supply-side advocates rarely present them as such.)
The Senate bill reauthorizes or extends several more HUD programs. It permanently authorizes the CDBG Disaster Recovery program (CDBG-DR), lifts the cap on the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, and adds a new Moving to Work cohort.
The bill also advances affordable housing preservation with a provision to decouple rental assistance from maturing mortgages, allowing residents to remain eligible for rent assistance even after mortgage-linked affordability requirements expire. This measure, a coalition of rural housing groups emphasizes, would help “preserve the agency’s nearly 400,000 affordable [Section] 515 multifamily housing units at risk of exiting the portfolio.”
One measure in the Senate bill that has generated considerable attention and controversy would prohibit institutional investors from owning—directly or indirectly—more than 350 single-family homes. This measure, known as section 901, offers an exemption allowing investors to own more than 350 homes if the homes are built specifically for the rental market, with the proviso that properties built to be rented out must be sold to individual homeowners within seven years after the date of purchase.
These limits on institutional investor ownership aim to counteract the trend in cities such as Atlanta, where private equity firms are outbidding homebuyers, thus reducing their availability. Industry opposition, however, is fierce, with housing supply advocates contending that the measure would reduce new construction. Doug Ryan, vice president of housing policy at Grounded Solutions Network, a national nonprofit promoting permanently affordable housing, says his organization joined an industry sign-on letter calling to amend this provision. The letter claims the measure would “jeopardize the financial viability of building single-family rental homes—an important option for families—and in doing so, decrease the very housing supply this bill is trying to create.”
What’s at Stake?
Because the Senate and House bills differ, a joint conference committee will likely need to convene to draft compromise language, with each house then voting again. In short, the entire legislative effort could still fall apart.
As Sanchez notes, the bills are not about “big game-changing ideas about how to do housing policy differently in this country. That’s not what we’re getting. We’re getting a package of little to medium-sized tweaks.” However, he says, those tweaks “are pretty good ideas”—particularly the manufactured housing policy provisions.
Ryan also emphasizes the value of small tweaks. One example, he says, is that the bill explicitly names community land trusts as an eligible use of funds in the reauthorization of HOME and other parts of the bill. “Putting that in statute is really important,” Ryan says.
Ryan also likes the provisions that encourage local action to enable denser housing. High land costs make developing affordable housing challenging, he says, “so having more density is critically important.”
More broadly, Ryan praises the bill for updating federal housing policy after a long period marked by limited action. “Admittedly, there’s no new money attached to it yet, but there hasn’t been a bill that authorizes new programs, reauthorizes programs, [or] redefines … rules and programs for the [current] era” in a long time, he says.
Johnson of NLIHC concurs, saying it’s great that there are “common-sense reforms and policies that Democrats and Republicans have both been able to agree on.” Permanent authorization of the disaster recovery program, CDBG-DR, is one provision that she’s particularly pleased about. Presently, Johnson notes, every time a disaster hits, “you have to go through a whole rigmarole of creating new rules for implementation. It really slows down … [getting] funding out to communities that need it. … To really ensure a long-term and more equitable recovery system, permanently authorizing and creating rules around how [disaster recovery] money can be used would be immensely beneficial.”
Johnson notes, however, that the Moving to Work and RAD expansions in the Senate bill gave NLIHC pause. “We’ve always opposed any expansion of RAD or [Moving to Work] until there is a better understanding of, one, the programs’ impact on tenants, and two, how we can ensure that any unintended or negative impacts on tenants are mitigated,” she says. However, “Ultimately, we were able to get to a place where we felt comfortable in knowing that we would also be able to continue working on regulatory implementation for those provisions.”
What Comes Next
Will something pass? That remains uncertain.
For his part, Sanchez is optimistic. “We’ll see if we end up with the biggest bill, where everything gets in, or if we end up with a narrower package. … But I think it’s very likely to pass in some form.”
Ryan and Johnson are more cautious.
Ryan says the bill’s passage seemed inevitable earlier in March, but he’s seen “more members of Congress coming out and saying they object to X, or they object to Y. … I would say a month ago, it probably had a 75 percent chance of becoming law, so I think we are losing some of that momentum … and I think every week we lose more momentum.”
According to Johnson, “There are a few factors that are at play. First is, of course, the election in November. At a certain point, folks are going to be back in their home states … campaigning. There is also the drive to start campaigning and be able to go back and say, ‘Hey, we passed this big housing bill.’ So that could also act as a motivating factor for them to get something over the finish line.”
Johnson warns though that time is short, saying a bill will either pass this spring or not at all. “Once you start getting into July, everybody is kind of out.”
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Interesting discussion, thanks. For the sake of argument, let’s accept the thrust of this discussion as being sincere and let’s take the history and claims of each participant in this panel discussion at face value. Doesn’t that beg several questions of participants? For example: Didn’t Steve Dubbs for Shelterforce effectively endorse the so-called 21st Century ROAD to Housing bill? “The Federal Housing Bill: ‘A Bunch of Tweaks, But Good Ones’” https://shelterforce.org/2026/04/01/federal-housing-legislation-attracts-broad-support-but-faces-obstacles/
Why hasn’t Shelterforce, or for that matter other participants in this panel discussion, publicly support a call for endorsing what the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) has consistently and persistently encouraged for months (years, actually). Namely that the Duty to Serve (DTS) manufactured housing (and by extension, the underserved markets) be rigorously mandated by adding it as an amendment to the pending legislation, regardless of what else may emerge from the House and Senate conference committee discussions?
https://manufacturedhousingassociationregulatoryreform.org/manufactured-housing-association-for-regulatory-reform-mharr-submits-amendments-to-address-key-manufactured-housing-bottlenecks-industry-must-act/
Some form of that same question should be posed to each of the panelists and to the entire Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition more broadly. There are arguably several fine points each of you have raised. Let’s be clear. Neither Democrats nor Republican Administrations in the 21st century have enforced DTS properly, or this panel discussion wouldn’t have been needed.
Neither major party have enforced the federal “enhanced preemption” provision of the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000. https://manufacturedhousingassociationregulatoryreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/House-Democrats-Financial-Services-Committee-Nov-2003-HUD-Secretary-Mel-Martinez-Manufactured-Housing-Improvement-Act-Enhanced-Preemption-Intent-Fax.pdf
But you have sitting in front of you the mechanism to compel change through mandates that must in practice BE an actual MANDATE. Fannie, Freddie, the GSEs more broadly, need to support the Duty to Serve manufactured housing.
Several of your organizations have at various times promoted the need for more manufactured housing to serve the entry level, upsizing, or downsizing homebuyer. Some of you have recognized that local zoning barriers need to overcome in order to make that happen. The proposed MHARR amendments would do precisely that, IF they were adopted. So why don’t each of you publicly call for the adoption of those amendments? https://manufacturedhousingassociationregulatoryreform.org/?s=amendments or https://www.housingwire.com/author/tony-kovach/