This spring, we reluctantly decided to oppose Senate legislation intended to make housing more affordable, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. While the legislation included some small reforms that could have reduced the cost of housing, it also added new regulations that would have made housing more expensive, not less. But, pleasingly, the House has released its own bipartisan version of the legislation this week, and it fixes the problems the Senate bill created.
This is legislation we can support. The Senate, and the White House, would be wise to adopt it.
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Housing affordability is arguably the most pressing public policy issue today. The median age of first-time homebuyers reached a record high of 40 in 2025, compared with just 29 in 1980. Only 1 in 5 homebuyers were first-time purchasers in 2025, down from around 2 in 5 in 2007.
Young adults’ inability to afford a home is one of the leading drivers of the United States’s declining birthrate, which reached a record low this year. If we fail to solve the housing affordability problem, the decline will continue.
The cause of high home prices is no mystery; not enough new homes are being built. The U.S. is between 3 million and 8 million homes short of what is needed for a normal and affordable housing market. The shortage is not a market failure but a policy failure. Federal and state governments have imposed a multitude of unnecessary restrictions and regulations on new home construction, driving up costs and making too many new projects unprofitable.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act eliminates outdated federal requirements that manufactured homes be built on a permanent chassis, allowing cheaper factory-built homes to be financed, titled, insured, sold, transported, and installed more like traditional housing. Second, it exempts more Department of Housing and Urban Development-financed projects, home repairs, rehabs, and infill housing from expensive NEPA review. And it wisely drops last year’s attempt to impose national zoning rules on counties receiving Community Development Block Grant funding, instead incentivizing more housing construction by rewarding counties that build more housing and penalizing those that do not.
These are all good but small steps toward housing affordability. If the Senate legislation had stopped there, it would have been worthy of support. Unfortunately, it went on to add new mandates forcing builders who rent homes to sell them after seven years. Unlike the legislation’s ban on institutional investors buying existing homes, those new rules for build-to-rent homes constituted a direct attack on new home construction. The federal government already has too many barriers to new construction; it does not need new ones. The House legislation has fixed this by simply removing the seven-year sell-off mandate.
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It should be noted that President Donald Trump endorsed the seven-year sale mandate sought by the Senate. Fortunately, House Republicans are confident they can pass their version of the legislation without Trump’s support. “Over the last couple of months, we’ve heard clear concerns from hundreds of members and stakeholders, and this bipartisan amendment reflects that feedback,” Rep. French Hill (R-AR), chairman of the financial services committee, said this week. “It cuts unnecessary barriers to new home construction, modernizes HUD programs, and allows banks to more freely deploy funding into their communities.”
The logic of the House bill is simple: Build more by regulating less. That is the only way out of America’s housing crisis. The Senate should admit its mistake, drop the anti-builder mandate, pass the House fix, and give Trump a housing bill that lowers costs by letting Americans build the homes they need.
