WASHINGTON — The House appeared poised Tuesday to pass Congress’ most significant housing legislation in decades — a bid by both parties to show midterm voters that they’re paying attention to affordability concerns ahead of November’s election.
The legislation, which the Senate passed Monday, aims to boost the housing supply through dozens of targeted provisions whose effects are expected to be seen over the next several years. In California, measures to provide federal funding for housing production in big cities could be particularly significant.
The bipartisan agreement over the legislation, after weeks of negotiation, marks a highly unusual collaboration in the divided Congress. It reflects growing public pressure on Washington to address economic issues, at a time when Americans’ economic woes are deepening amid inflation, elevated gas prices and the ongoing effects of Trump’s tariffs.
The bill aims to help housing supply by removing regulatory barriers to building affordable housing units, preventing large investors from buying up single-family homes and incentivizing housing production in cities with federal funding, among other measures.
The package focuses on addressing housing supply constraints and making federal programs easier to use, said David Gonzalez Rice, senior vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Though the legislation does not create major new funding streams, advocates see the bipartisan acknowledgment of the need for housing reforms as significant.
“It’s a big step in the right direction,” Gonzalez Rice said, “and there’s still a lot of work to do.”
The bill was approved by the Senate on Monday with an 85-5 vote, with five Republicans opposed. The Trump administration has signaled support for the bill.
Addressing cost-of-living issues has become high-stakes for lawmakers engaged in midterm reelection campaigns, as Americans increasingly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Democrats are hoping to leverage affordability issues to gain control of at least one chamber of Congress, while Republicans are fighting to maintain their majorities.
It was politically crucial for members of both parties to be able to tell voters they had worked in good faith to address housing affordability, said David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
“It would’ve been hard to justify to voters during their campaigns that their party did not do everything they could to advance the first meaningful legislation on housing policy in decades,” Garcia said.
The legislation was a product of intense bipartisan negotiations led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) after months of discussions in both parties about how to address housing.
Waters, who said the tough conversations were no small feat, called the collaboration “the beginning of a renewed effort to tackle our housing affordability crisis.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) pledged Friday that the bill would “get to President Trump’s desk.”
Trump — who has largely dismissed the affordability issue, last week calling it “a fake word” — had indicated support for housing reforms.
In a March statement of policy, the administration indicated it “strongly supports” passage of the bill, saying it represented “significant advances in federal housing policy.” Trump also signed an executive order suggesting that regulatory barriers to home building should be removed, a concept reflected in the bill.
The nationwide affordability crisis has been driven for years by rising costs, a shortage of affordable housing, higher mortgage rates and other factors. Recent rising construction costs and labor shortages have exacerbated the issue, according to the National Assn. of Home Builders.
The number of new housing starts built in May dropped by more than 15%, according to a report last week from the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
California has added housing supply in recent years, but its shortage remains significant and prices high. The state has among the highest rates of households spending disproportionate amounts of their income on housing, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
The momentum in Washington to respond to those pressures — which came as something of a surprise to advocates — can be viewed as a reflection of current public sentiment, Gonzalez Rice said.
“It speaks to the broader understanding of the public that housing is a policy problem, that government can do something about it and the expectation that government will do something about it,” he said. “It’s clear elected officials are hearing from their constituents.”
The bill includes nearly 50 provisions, including the prohibition on investor purchasing of single-family homes, which is intended to help increase the housing supply for individual buyers. It also seeks to help cities convert abandoned buildings into new housing and help landlords and homeowners make home repairs.
Two measures are expected to be particularly significant for cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, Garcia said: One ties some federal funding under the Community Development Block Grant program to housing production to motivate cities with low housing supply and high costs to build more housing. The other allows CBDG money to be used for affordable housing construction, opening a new revenue source for cities.
California’s big cities may be spurred to increase housing production in future years, Garcia said, and they also could benefit from the ability to direct CBDG funding to housing.
“Costs to build are so high,” he said, “that any new funding could be critical.”
Among other steps that could have swift results is a plan to preserve a rental assistance program for nearly 400,000 rural homeowners and a measure to streamline the leasing process for families using vouchers, Gonzalez Rice said.
The bill also makes certain projects exempt from a set of environmental regulations, a step aimed at allowing the review and construction process to move more quickly. And it seeks to make it easier to build manufactured homes by removing a requirement that they be built on a chassis, which the Senate committee estimated would reduce the cost of each new unit by up to $10,000.
