A few days ago, Congress finally responded to the nation’s housing affordability crisis with what lawmakers dubbed the the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The final law retained the attractive title “Homes Are for People, Not Corporations.”
That label no longer applies. The final bill passed as a wizened shell of its former self, a poorly funded, toothless nod and a wink to a handful of institutions, not a game changer.
This blob of a bill began to take shape back in January when Trump issued an executive order that large institutional investors should not buy houses that could otherwise be purchased by families.
Briefly, this had the sparkle of a genuine course correction. The Senate passed language prohibiting large investors from purchasing most additional single-family homes. The initial bill also required qualifying build-to-rent houses to be sold to individual buyers within seven years, and gave renters first-look and purchase rights.
But then the lobbyists arrived. Into the dumpster went the investor restrictions. Down the drain went the build-to-rent provision.
The National Association of Home Builders says that it led the effort to remove the provision, making the issue a priority in approximately 300 congressional meetings.
Is the outcome something to brag about? Not unless you set the bar pretty low.
For the small builder constructing six or eight houses a year, the benefits will be particularly thin. A builder might eventually use a pre-approved duplex design, obtain a loan from a community bank helped by the law or encounter a locality that has accepted a federal planning grant. But the bill does not provide that builder with an affordable lot, lower an impact fee, shorten a subdivision review, reduce the price of lumber or help a buyer qualify for a mortgage.
Perhaps the most misunderstand limitation of this bill is that it’s aimed at 3 percent of the housing market, and consists of pilot programs, studies, reporting requirements, agency guidelines and grants that Congress has not actually funded. Indeed, Section 1202 of the enacted legislation states explicitly that no additional funds are authorized to carry out the act.
Some of the agencies put in charge of disbursing funds from this bill are the same ones savaged by DOGE back in 2025. For example, HUD and USDA are supposed to implement the plan’s pilots, administer grants, review applications, write regulations and so on. But an estimated 2,300 HUD employees had left by October 2025—about 23% of the agency’s workforce. USDA Rural Development was reported to be operating with 36% fewer staff than at the beginning of 2025.
This bill didn’t have to be so lame. The real problems are well known. Homes cost too much because developable land is expensive, local zoning limits what can be built, entitlement processes take years, construction loans are costly, skilled labor is scarce, building materials remain expensive, insurance markets are retreating and mortgage rates have demolished buyers’ purchasing power.
None of these big-ticket items will disappear under this new bill.
A few big institutions, however, will get a bump:
FHA multifamily loan limits are increased.
Banks receive more room to make public-welfare investments.
Community banks obtain deposit and regulatory relief.
Affordable-housing developers and tax-credit syndicators gain financing capacity.
Manufactured-housing companies gain an expanded market.
Institutional build-to-rent investors preserve their ability to own entire communities indefinitely. Hurrah.
Congress has produced a housing bill ideally suited to Washington: broad enough to sound historic, complicated enough to defy public scrutiny and underfunded enough to avoid a serious fiscal commitment.
Is it too cynical to say they gave us exactly what we expected: a watered-down, lobbyist scraped bill that ignores 97 percent of the housing market?