Trump-backed housing overhaul targeting Wall Street investors clears Senate

The Senate advanced a massive, Trump-backed housing package that proponents say will prevent the U.S. from becoming a "nation of renters." 

The upper chamber sent the 21st Century Road to Housing Act to the House on Monday after months of delay. After the heads of the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee reached a deal last week, the package is on a glide path to President Donald Trump’s desk. 

It’s the first major push by Congress to address housing regulations in decades, and one Trump has been calling on lawmakers to complete as the midterm elections near. 

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Loaded with nearly 60 different provisions, the package broadly tackles rolling back some permitting regulations, launches several pilot grant programs to build, repair and push affordable housing construction, and blocks investors from buying up housing stock — a key provision pushed by Trump.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the architects of the package, said the legislation was "not the federal government big footing local government," but instead the federal government laying out tweaks to current programs and policies that "over time will make housing more affordable."

"This is a housing package that will help increase supply and bring down costs," Warren said. "One way is by beating back private equity, so they won't invade your neighborhood, buy up all the houses, and turn America into a nation of renters." 

Warren said that among several things, the package increases access to manufactured housing by changing the federal definition to open up for more units to be constructed, pre-approved plan books for local governments to quickly approve new construction, and the waiving of some environmental review regulations for the construction of new homes.

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"It's not just one piece that's gonna solve a problem," Warren said.
"It's a whole lot of smaller pieces that push in the same direction that's important." 

The package also tries to turbocharge housing stock by tying federal grants and incentives sought by local governments to housing construction. And there are tweaks to mortgages, with a push for small-dollar mortgages at $100,000 and updates to lending standards for manufactured homes. 

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, whose provision to establish pre-approved housing designs to speed up home construction made it into the package, said the legislation "sends a signal to state and local communities, to say, ‘Hey, guys, you really have to drive down the cost of housing, and you do that by not torturing homebuilders.’"

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While there are several moving parts to the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, it does not tackle every facet of housing costs.

For instance, it does not allocate fresh federal funding for the issue, as Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., has lauded the package as being deficit neutral. Nor does it directly address rising costs of homeownership, given that much of the thrust is focused on building new homes and lowering the barrier of entry for Americans to get into a home. 

And for some, it does not go far enough to address permitting issues. 

Sen. Alan Armstrong, R-Okla., argued that the "legislation as drafted fails to meaningfully address" the issues of housing costs.

"Instead, this legislation makes a half-hearted attempt to waive minor environmental laws while failing to address the need for permitting reform at large," Armstrong said. 

"Our permitting process deserves its own committed effort, and attaching weak slivers of those reforms to unrelated legislation undermines the work currently being done to pass comprehensive, meaningful permitting reform," he said.