If the House and Senate Quit Squabbling, We Could Actually Make Housing More Available

On Thursday afternoon, the United States Senate passed the single largest piece of housing legislation we’ve seen in 36 years via an overwhelmingly supported, bipartisan effort. The bill, known as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, contains both provisions to lower the cost and speed up the pace of American home construction, and also provisions aimed at barring certain kinds of institutional investors from being able to buy in/profit from or restrict the housing industry. Across its 300 pages, the legislation ropes in both Republican and Democratic priorities to tackle housing affordability, including some of President Donald Trump’s own pet issues, seemingly being a win-win bill that both sides could claim credit for in the build-up to November’s midterm elections. It would likely be popular with the vast majority of voters.

So naturally, it’s considered to be an extreme longshot to pass the House of Representatives or be signed into law by Trump, because this is America, where being in Congress means getting 95% of what you want and then being prepared to fight your own allies to the death about the other 5%, rather than doing anything that might benefit Americans. However, if members of Congress can put aside a few differences for just a few minutes, while agreeing to ignore the objections of Donald Trump, who is still wailing that Congress needs to pass his voter ID/disenfranchisement bill first, they could actually do something concrete for prospective U.S. homeowners. Or at least they could force Trump to veto an extremely popular bill, further digging himself into the mire of his own hatedness.

‼️ The Senate just passed major legislation to tackle the housing crisis.

But now Trump and House Republicans might block its final passage because, according to Trump, “no one gives a (bleep) about housing.”

Temper Tantrum Trump might kill this bill simply because he can’t have the SAVE Act.

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— 5 Calls (@5calls.org) Mar 12, 2026 at 1:44 PM

As is so often the case, one of the problems here amounts to a House vs. Senate dick measuring contest, with both sides adding their own elements or poison pills to the same piece of legislation and then claiming that the other side has to accept the revisions. This bill essentially began in the House as H.R. 6644, the “Housing for the 21st Century Act,” which was primarily focused on housing construction and deregulation. The Senate then came along and heavily amended it with a 100-page substitute, with most of the additions providing more direct aid to homebuyers, and tackling specific issues such as a proviso to protect veterans from predatory lending. At the same time, however, it also stripped out some elements from the House bill, such as one section dealing with community banking lending rules that had been championed by Rep. French Hill (AK), the GOP chairman of the Financial Services Committee. Basically, there are enough tweaks here and there to leave members of the House on both sides of the aisle feeling jilted. According to The New York Times, one of the bill’s original House sponsors, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters (CA), said in response that “she wanted the House and Senate to negotiate to resolve their differences over the measure, signaling that it would not have the support to pass the House unless changes were made.”

By far the most prominent additions, meanwhile, to the Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act are in the form of various rules that would serve to bar the influence of larger institutional investors from amassing single family homes–a populist issue that has been a pet one of Trump’s, which he partially addressed in a January executive order. Here, the Senate bill co-sponsored by the likes of Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Tim Scott (SC) improbably aligns with Trump’s stated goals, although in a way that is still causing plenty of friction. A section with the provocative title of “Homes Are For People, Not Corporations” would restrict how private investors are allowed to buy, build and own single-family homes–specifically, investors who own 350 or more single-family homes would not be able to buy any more. And although investors would be allowed to build single-family homes to serve specifically as rental properties, the law would require the owner-builder to sell those homes after a period of seven years in order to bring those properties onto the open market. This is a provision that will be unpopular with certain House of Representatives members on both sides of the aisle, who criticize it as a rule that will depress the building of new rental housing, which accounts for 7% of single-family construction.

Even some Democratic Senators objected to this, most notably Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who apparently thinks that it’s a “very bizarre thing” for such a rule to apply to any investor that isn’t a hedge fund. “There’s literally no reason for this,” said Schatz on the floor of the Senate. “Anyone who wants to build housing and then provide it for rent is going to be forced to sell after seven years. … A lot of these folks are not actually in a position to sell after seven years. They will not have made their money back. This is positively Soviet.” Sounds like a guy with plenty of landlords in his constituency.

I see that amid the Senate housing debate, Online Marketing Specialist Matt Yglesias & some Dems are pretending that oligarchs & billionaires owning lots of housing isnt part of what’s driving the housing crisis.

This is, to put it bluntly, a brazen & provable lie, as shown by Federal Reserve data.

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— David Sirota (@davidsirota.com) Mar 12, 2026 at 11:06 AM

Members of the House and Senate are thus left with the prospect of potentially needing a conference committee in order to come to some kind of compromise on the housing legislation that the Senate has now put forward. But it’s unclear if Republicans in particular will even give this conversation the time of day—despite it including Trump’s own desires—because the President is simultaneously ordering them to embrace total gridlock in an attempt to get the Senate to pass his deeply poisonous voter ID SAVE Act, now renamed even more vomit-inducingly as the SAVE America Act. That piece of legislation is primarily intended as voter suppression in advance of the very blue-looking incoming midterms, and would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote. It would also, however, present cascading problems for many other people such as married women who have changed their legal names since registering, potentially requiring millions of people to register to vote all over again. That legislation passed the House of Representatives but has looked dead in the Senate … and that was before Trump began demanding more random provisions be added to it, such as language banning trans women’s participation in sports, because lord knows that’s relevant to a voter ID bill, right? Trump claimed online over the weekend that he “would not sign other bills until this is passed, and not the watered down version.”

That Trump doesn’t actually give a shit in reality about building more housing is the least surprising thing you’ll hear all day, and yet it does bear repeating—he’s only genuinely interested in doing things he can either put his name on for prestige, or things he think will lend him a little bit more power in some way. His lack of genuine interest in helping Americans recently manifested in a rather wonderful quote from an unnamed member of Congress, who while attending the GOP’s annual congressional retreat said that House Speaker Mike Johnson told Republicans that it was their sole duty to get the SAVE Act passed, because Trump says “no one gives a fuck about housing.” A White House spokesman has since disavowed that quote, saying it’s “not accurate whatsoever” while promising that Trump would be signing “bold new executive orders on housing in the coming days.” Because naturally, why wouldn’t Trump simply keep taking on the job of writing his own fake bills in the form of executive orders, when the Congressional GOP are always tripping over themselves to give away their own constitutionally vested powers as quickly as they can? As long as they can continue trading stocks and covering up for pedophiles, all is well, right? They’re not in need of housing, after all.

There’s something deeply wrong in a country, fundamentally broken in its backward legislative process, when a potentially landmark piece of legislation overwhelmingly passes the U.S. Senate by a 9 to 1 margin, but is still considered improbable to become law, thanks to a toxic combination of pride, politics and the desire to undermine democracy even more than it’s already been weakened. Are there enough people in the House of Representatives who “give a fuck about housing” to pass this thing and send it to Trump’s desk? I hope so. Make the man veto his own housing priorities, months before the midterm elections. Make him strip Americans of the American dream of home ownership, yet again. Make him put up, or shut up. It’s the least Congress could do, for a change.