The Senate voted 89-10 to pass H.R. 6644, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Three hundred eighty-one pages. The corporate landlord ban that got all the headlines? Nineteen of those pages.
The other 362 pages are where it gets interesting.
Senators Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, co-sponsored the bill. It's being sold as the bipartisan fix for America's housing crisis. The bill has been called "the housing bill from hell" that targets red America — and once you read past the press releases, it's hard to argue with him.
Here's what the bill actually does. Section 205, the "Build Now Act," ties Community Development Block Grant allocations to housing growth rates. Counties that exceed the median housing growth rate get bonus funding. Counties that fall below the median? A 10% penalty on their CDBG allocation. If your rural county isn't building fast enough by Washington's standards, you lose federal dollars.
There are exemptions — for counties that lack zoning authority, have high rental vacancy rates, low home values, or have been hit by a federally declared disaster. But for the average red-state suburb that simply doesn't want high-density development reshaping its neighborhoods, the message is clear: build or pay.
The bill directs HUD to publish "best practices" for state and local zoning. Those best practices include allowing duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in single-family zones. Allowing manufactured homes in single-family zones. Allowing multifamily development in retail and light manufacturing zones. Reducing minimum lot sizes. Creating transit-oriented development zones.
Officially, the bill says HUD cannot "take adverse action against a state or locality if it declines to adopt a guideline or best practice." Officially. But when your CDBG funding is already tied to growth metrics and grant recipients must report every five years on whether they've adopted the zoning changes Washington recommends, the distinction between a mandate and a strong suggestion gets awfully thin.
The bill also includes $200 million in "Housing Innovation Grants" for counties implementing "innovative housing supply strategies" — which means the communities that play ball with the density agenda get rewarded. It expands HOME Investment Partnerships eligibility for workforce housing. It allows communities to dedicate up to 20% of CDBG funds to new construction. And it creates the RESIDE Act, converting vacant properties to "attainable housing" defined as 120% of area median income or less.
The bill expands HUD and Federal Housing Administration programs "that helped fuel the housing bubble through artificial subsidies." The corporate ownership ban — the provision that prohibits institutional investors holding 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional properties — comes with exemptions for built-to-rent, rent-to-own, and renovate-to-rent programs that only require divestment after seven years. That's a loophole you could drive a housing development through.
The NEPA categorical exclusions are telling, too. Low-impact HUD projects — infill, rehabilitation, minor infrastructure, anything four units or fewer — get exempted from rigorous environmental review. The same environmental review process that conservatives have watched Democrats weaponize against energy projects for decades suddenly becomes an obstacle when Washington wants apartments built faster.
Rural communities get their own provisions. The bill decouples rental assistance from expiring USDA Section 515 mortgages and directs joint USDA-HUD environmental reviews. Rural housing reform sounds reasonable in a press release. In practice, it means two federal agencies coordinating on what gets built in communities that elected people specifically to keep Washington out of their zoning decisions.
The bill passed the Senate with 89 votes. That's not bipartisan consensus. That's a lack of opposition, which is a different thing entirely.
When a 381-page bill gets reduced to a 19-page talking point about corporate landlords, somebody's hoping you won't read the other 362 pages. The housing crisis is real. The solution probably shouldn't involve Washington telling your county commission how many apartment buildings qualifies as enough.
