(The Center Square) – The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill to increase American housing supply and lower home prices, in an 89-10 vote Thursday.
The passage of the legislation, which now moves to the House of Representatives, comes as the median home price in the U.S. sits above $405,000. The median annual household income, meanwhile, is below $84,000, according to the most recent federal statistics.
“Our nation is in a full-blown housing crisis. Across rural communities, small towns, suburban neighborhoods, and major cities, home prices are sky high, rent is through the roof, and just last year, the median age of a first time homebuyer hit 40 years old,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a cosponsor of the bill, told lawmakers Thursday.
“This landmark, bipartisan bill will help tackle the root cause of this crisis by getting more homes built in every community across this country.”
Among dozens of other red tape-cutting policies, the bill focuses on expanding and supporting manufactured housing.
It revises the federal definition of “manufactured housing” to include units not built on permanent chassis and authorizes a specialized grant program for areas with manufactured housing communities. It also updates mortgage lending standards through the Federal Housing Administration for manufactured homes.
Other measures include streamlining environmental reviews for new housing construction, lifting the 15% cap on banks’ private investments in affordable housing to 20%, and establishing a pilot program to convert vacant and abandoned buildings into livable housing.
The two provisions causing the most stir, however, are both additions that President Donald Trump personally endorsed.
One prohibits the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency before the year 2030, addressing some Republicans’ concerns over financial liberty and privacy rights.
The other, which has wide bipartisan support, bans large institutional investors from buying single-family homes for the next 15 years – though manufactured housing, multifamily homes, and homes built as rentals are exempted.
Connected to that ban is a requirement that institutional investors sell rental homes they build to individuals within seven years of construction, which supporters say will expand the number of homes on the market and drive down prices.
Critics, however – mostly House lawmakers – are concerned that constraints on private equity ownership of homes could skew markets.
Echoed by his colleagues, House Financial Services Vice Chair Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., has said he will not support the bill in its current form, increasing the risk that the bill could stall or fail in the lower chamber.
Private investors own more than 15 million properties, which includes apartment units, in the U.S, according to a recent analysis by BatchData. The report also found that nearly 27% of all home sales in the first quarter of 2025 went to investors, both corporate and individual.
