In the United States, home ownership is increasingly associated with stress, frustration, and widespread economic anxiety. The country is in the midst of a generational housing supply crisis. J.P. Morgan Chase recently estimated that America faces a housing deficit of 2.8 million units, which could take approximately 10 years to resolve. Others, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, estimate a shortage of 4.7 million homes.
Meanwhile, a Harvard University study from June 2026 found that national property prices have risen by 54 per cent since 2020, and the average sale price for single-family homes is almost five times the median household income. These developments necessitated action.
On 11 July, Congress passed the "21st Century ROAD to Housing Act" with overwhelming bipartisan majorities – 85-5 in the Senate and 358-32 in the House of Representatives. The act addresses the long-standing housing shortage through a combination of over 40 different economic incentives, regulatory reforms, and updates to existing federal laws. The goal is to stimulate the construction of new affordable housing, single-family homes, and manufactured homes. ROAD stands for "Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream".
Dennis Shea, Executive Vice President for Housing at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., explained that both political parties heard from their constituents that the issue of housing affordability was very serious, as high housing costs affected communities of all kinds across the country. He added that there was no silver bullet to tackle this problem, but rather the private sector was needed.
The act is described as a mixture of incentives and requirements for municipalities and private sector players to encourage housing production through construction and investment. In addition, some formerly cumbersome federal laws are being updated to reduce bureaucracy that had hindered the sector for decades. David Garcia, Deputy Director of Policy at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, said this legislation does many small things that individually may not seem significant, but collectively could have a real impact on increasing housing supply and lowering costs over time.
Critics, however, point out that the new law does not provide new funds for housing development and that its reforms interfere with local housing policies and private investment strategies. President Donald Trump refused to sign the bill (it became law even without his signature), calling it "a big yawn". Toby Cobb, Managing Partner and co-founder of 3650 Capital, said it was an unfortunate reality that despite bipartisan support, the act was so weak and terrible legislation. It contained many different things but actually achieved very little and only caused people to spend money on lawyers.
In contrast, then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the act "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history". It is certainly the most notable bipartisan housing legislation since the passage of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) in 1986 and the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008.
Jeffrey Lubell, Senior Fellow at the Terwilliger Center for Housing at the Urban Land Institute, stressed that Americans should not expect the federal government to solve the housing supply problem in one fell swoop. He noted that this new law contains many modest but useful provisions that will ultimately make a material difference in supporting an expanded housing supply. He concluded that it is now down to the details of implementation.
Even before the legislation, critical aspects of American single-family home construction became caught up in a complicated legislative process. This could have had far-reaching consequences for commercial property investors. While the new housing act has its origins in a bipartisan bill introduced in August 2025 by Senators Elizabeth Warren (Democrat from Massachusetts) and Tim Scott (Republican from South Carolina), development gained momentum in early January. This happened after Trump called on Congress to exclude large institutional investors like BlackRock and Blackstone from buying single-family homes and converting them into rental properties. He justified this in a social media post by stating that "people live in homes, not companies".
While elected officials in both chambers negotiated the intricacies, it became clear that the Build-to-Rent (BTR) industry – a subclass of single-family homes often built identically in planned communities or as townhouses in subdivisions and marketed as rental properties – would be adversely affected. BTR accounts for up to 4 per cent of the housing market and is primarily owned and developed by institutional investors. The provision originally passed by the Senate, which required institutional investors to sell BTR single-family homes to individual buyers after seven years, was therefore not implementable. Ultimately, the House bill removed this provision and completely exempted BTR, after which the final bill was passed.
