Senate Passes Housing Affordability Bill 85-5, Sending It to the House

The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on Monday by a vote of 85-5, sending the broadest federal housing bill in years to the House, which hopes to vote within days before the measure can reach President Trump’s desk.

The bill pairs two ideas that rarely share a sentence in Washington: make it easier to build homes, and make it harder for Wall Street to buy them. It would approve a series of grant and funding programs for new construction, cut federal red tape and push local governments to speed permitting, while a section titled Homes Are For People, Not Corporations would restrict large institutional investors from buying up single-family houses, according to NBC News.

The vote count understates the day only slightly. Several senators missed it after severe thunderstorms triggered a ground stop at Reagan National Airport, NBC reported. The bill had been stranded for months: the Senate passed one version in March, the House passed a different one in May, and the final text came together only after the Senate accepted House provisions and dropped one the House opposed.

The deal was negotiated by an unlikely quartet — Senators Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the Banking Committee, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, alongside Representatives French Hill of Arkansas and Maxine Waters of California, CBS News reported. Hill, who chairs House Financial Services, has pointed to nine community-banking measures and the investor language as key House priorities in the final bill.

Scott, who has made housing his signature issue, tied the bill to his own childhood in remarks on the Senate floor. I grew up in a rental property, he said, recalling a 700-square-foot place he shared with his mother and brother, before noting how far the ladder has drifted: the average first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. That age is too old, he said.

The politics are not subtle. Republicans head toward the 2026 midterms with voters unconvinced the party has done much about the cost of living, and a bipartisan housing win is the kind of tangible result polls reward. Affordability also runs through the same machinery the Federal Reserve signalled this month, where the prospect of higher rates keeps mortgages expensive no matter how many homes get built.

For now the bill clears one chamber and moves to the next. The House has signalled it could take up the measure within days; until it does, the most sweeping housing legislation in a generation is exactly that — a bill that has passed one half of Congress, and nothing a buyer can yet use.