America’s housing crisis isn’t complicated to diagnose. For decades, local governments have made it expensive, complicated, and legally fraught to build new homes, leading to a chronic mismatch between demand and supply. The national shortfall of homes is now somewhere between 4 million and 7 million units, and a generation of young families feels permanently priced out of the neighborhoods where they work. We know what the problem is, but for a bitterly divided Congress, the question remains: Can idealists on both sides stomach a bipartisan answer?
As it stands, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, introduced by Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is the most serious attempt to address partisan divisions on homeownership. For those of us focused on market solutions, ROAD is a test of whether we can maintain a coherent position on housing even when the politics get uncomfortable.
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The bill’s strongest provisions are its supply-side reforms, drawing on ideas from over a dozen previously introduced bills, such as streamlining the NEPA review process for federally assisted housing and tying Community Development Block Grant funding to actual permitting and production — not merely stated intent. Right now, cities can access grants simply by declaring plans to build, deploying them as a maintenance fund rather than greenlighting new units.
To overcome NIMBYism at the city council and county board level, an Innovation Fund will provide $200 million annually in competitive grants rewarding localities that reform zoning to allow more homes per acre — a helpful carrot where political obstacles to development are otherwise immovable.
The bill also modernizes manufactured housing, one of the most underrated opportunities in the affordability debate. Removing the 1974 permanent chassis requirement eliminates a regulation that inflates costs by up to $10,000 for a housing type used by roughly 8.4 million people.
ROAD also offers a ready-made path to accessory dwelling unit approval and a program to convert vacant commercial and industrial buildings into housing, the practice of upzoning. California is just one of many states where zoning makes it illegal to convert strip malls into apartment units — a restraint cities like Lexington, Kentucky, have scrapped, choosing instead to allow housing in boarded-up vape shops and sketchy tax law offices.
Anything that can be done on the national level to spur more changes like this will make an impact over time.
Of course, there are politically fraught provisions in the bill, including restrictions on large institutional investors, specifically a limit on how many single-family homes these large firms can own. After 350 units, ROAD forces divestiture with some exceptions. President Donald Trump called for a total ban on investment firms buying up units, creating a bridge between his coalition and the progressives steering policy among congressional Democrats.
Objections include that “demand is demand” regardless of who’s bidding on a home, and that the forced-sale provisions may run into serious constitutional problems. Both points are worth taking seriously, as is the question of fairness for the prospective homebuyer outbid on their dream home by a Wall Street firm flipping it as a rental.
The truth is that the number of single-family homes owned by large institutions in America is less than 1%, and barely 2.5% for rental units. If companies are willing to put up the capital to build new housing units and power through the regulatory process, this is a net benefit that means more people are housed, not less. Putting restrictions on which legal entities can buy, own, or sell homes is constitutionally dubious at best and is better politics than policy — which would explain the bipartisan support from Scott and Warren.
WAKE UP BLACK AMERICA: EXCELLENCE IS OUR HERITAGE
The ROAD Act is not a perfect piece of legislation. Nothing that passes the Senate Banking Committee with Scott and Warren’s names on it will satisfy everyone. But perfection is not the standard — the standard is whether it makes it meaningfully easier to build more homes in more places for more people. On that measure, this bill clears the bar, and housing affordability and homeownership advocates should say so.
Stephen Kent is media director for the Consumer Choice Center. Follow him on X @StephenKentX
