A Good Housing Bill and Trump's Bad Affordability Politics
Signing even a symbolic housing bill would buy Trump some breathing room. The ROAD Act is much more substantive than that.
“I said I’m not signing the housing bill […] it’s all about the interest rates. Lower the interest rates and you are going to have all the housing you want.” - President Trump, via Acyn
If the third time is the charm, the fourth time is pathological. And for the fourth time during the past year and a half, President Trump chose his own goals over affordability and everything else voters elected him to do.
Earlier this week, Congress passed the Road to Housing Act, the first serious effort in decades to get more housing built. While Republicans were promoting it, Trump announced he wouldn’t sign it unless the Senate passed a bill on voting.
Before we dig into that, there are many examples of Trump’s indifference to what voters expected, but three stand out:
The first was the destabilizing announcement of tariffs. Rather than a tariff strategy designed to lock in competitive advantage or check China, we got tariffs on things we don’t make, like bananas, tariffs as an aggressive wedge against long-time allies, and us selling high-end NVIDIA chips to China anyway. It’s a confusing mess, and people are paying for it.
The second was the budget. Severe cuts to SNAP and Medicaid and the expiration of the premium tax credits, all to fund the continuation and expansion of high-end tax cuts, while also blowing out the deficit. All together, according to the Yale Budget Lab, the bottom 80% of people are worse off between the tariffs and the budget. Again, reducing their incomes is not what people elected Trump to do.
Costly military adventurism in Iran is the third. Understanding the specific strategy here isn’t really my world, but just as a concerned citizen, it’s pretty obvious that there’s no plan. There was never a plan. Trump ran as the anti-war candidate and I’m sure people are remembering this betrayed promise as they cut back their summer travel plans over energy prices.
What’s Good in the ROAD Act
Which makes the housing action even more pathological. The one thing he could have done was sign anything on housing, and the Road to Housing Act is much more than symbolic. I think there’s a lot here that you probably don’t know. This bill has mostly been debated in fairly technocratic circles, and it bundles together provisions drawn from more than 60 separate bills, 36 of them with bipartisan sponsors. There’s no big headline item driving the conversation. Instead, it’s a genuine bipartisan bill, a good mix of what liberals like and what conservatives like, negotiated carefully over many rounds. That’s why it passed 358 to 32 in the House and 85 to 5 in the Senate.
A few things stand out on the affordability front. Much of the challenge of federal intervention in the housing market is that it is fundamentally local. But mobile home regulations are not. So the bill makes important, much-needed changes to mobile homes, where the federal government sets the standards. As Rachel Cohen at Vox has reported, the current rules require every manufactured home to be built on a permanent steel chassis. The bill removes that requirement, which alone takes $5,000 to $10,000 off the cost of a home. That also opens up floor plans, makes two-story manufactured homes possible, and helps these homes fit into more neighborhoods.
There are other baby steps toward industrial policy for housing, including clearing FHA financing barriers for modular developers, raising FHA loan limits for manufactured homes and ADUs, and commissioning studies of off-site construction’s cost-effectiveness, all of which can help lower the capital and regulatory friction around factory production. As more people are discussing (D’Amico et al 2024, Gupta & Teles 2026), the lack of factory-scale housing production is certainly a major reason we’ve seen declining productivity in construction, and these simple changes can start to push us in that direction. We discuss this element of boosting productivity in housing in the Economic Security Project’s Building Affordability report, which I recently co-authored with Ned Resnikoff and Becky Chao.
Building codes are another other target. The bill sets federal standards and pilot funding for some important reforms, notably single-stair buildings at six floors and under. As we note in our report, the stairs rule is especially hard on young families. Requiring a second staircase forces smaller apartments with fewer bedrooms, which is a big reason new construction skews toward studios and one-bedrooms while the family-sized two- and three-bedroom units are so scarce. And there’s little extra safety to show for it (Pew 2025). This bill doesn’t have the funding to compel areas to adopt these reforms. However, a coordination mechanism for local politicians, activists, and other policy entrepreneurs can be helpful, and a few well-studied pilots can open people’s eyes on these subtle costs. The bill lets the federal government and HUD name other focal points to coordinate around.
ROAD does more that we discuss in the report. It also loosens the timing of inspection rules that lead some landlords to turn away Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV). The obvious downside to this bipartisan bill is the lack of funding to push reforms more dramatically, and HCV would benefit from more funded pilots. But this does have upsides to build from.
The bill also bars large institutional investors, the funds that already own at least 350 single-family homes, from buying up any more. My honest read is that the evidence on the national effects is mixed, both on landlord characteristics (Gurun et al 2023) and renters-vs-buyers (Coven 2025). But there are places, notably the Sun Belt metros across the Southeast like Atlanta and Charlotte (especially in their entry-level tier where first-time buyers compete), where the concentration is high enough to matter. And they managed to write it without the negative impact of cutting off build-to-rent construction or potentially forcing evictions after a set number of years. This is overall a balanced solution to a concern that is shared by both parties and is genuinely widespread among the public.
A personal fave: everyone is trying to figure out where the “Occupy to DSA to sewer socialist YIMBY elected representative” pipeline is going to end up. Well, a person who pioneered this trend, Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval (with a detour through small left-wing literary magazines), started a state program in 2022 called Whole-Home Repairs. It funded an office in every county where people could go to fix up and weatherize an aging home, cut their energy bills, or adapt it so an older relative could keep living there. Nearly 4,000 Pennsylvania households have used it, and Maine, Maryland, and Washington built their own versions. The Road to Housing Act takes that idea national as a pilot in Section 202. Keeping existing homes from falling into disrepair is one of the key channels for housing affordability, and it shows how the new YIMBY sewer socialist left is demonstrating projects that can scale.
Even if it becomes law, the fact that Trump’s first instinct was to use the central economic anxiety people face as leverage for other priorities is just another example of how badly his team has misunderstood the job.