President Donald Trump is pressing Congress to move the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, a Senate-passed housing bill that has stalled in the House over a fight about limiting large investors in the single-family home market. In a Truth Social post Monday night, Trump said the bill would put homes in the hands of people, not corporations.
The push lands as housing costs remain a punishing burden for buyers. Since 2019, home prices have risen more than 50% on average, while wages have climbed 22% over the same period, leaving the affordability gap wider even as lawmakers search for fixes. Trump wrote that he was asking Congress to pass the bill and said the measure would help save the American Dream of homeownership.
The Senate approved the legislation 89-10 in March, giving it rare bipartisan backing. The bill would try to lower costs and increase housing supply through a set of policy changes, including efforts to simplify environmental review for small building projects, change manufactured home requirements to reduce their costs, and tie some state and local grants to housing production goals. It is the Senate's first major housing bill since the subprime mortgage crisis, a sign of how long Congress has gone without tackling the issue at this scale.
The House has been weighing changes to the measure since it left the Senate, but the central obstacle has been the investor restriction. That dispute has kept the bill from advancing even as housing affordability has become a mounting political and economic crisis nationwide. Trump’s intervention is meant to force the issue back to the front of the chamber’s agenda and give the bill fresh momentum.
The measure has drawn support from organizations focused on low-income housing, advocacy groups for cities and state housing finance authorities, and trade groups including the National Association of Realtors and the Manufactured Housing Institute. Dennis Shea called it very good that Congress is taking meaningful action, but said the problem is too large for one tool alone: “We really need to have multiple levers of policy. It’s a tough problem to solve.”
That is the choice now facing the House Republican Conference: whether to keep debating the investor limits or move a Senate bill that has already cleared one chamber with nearly 90 votes. With Trump publicly backing the legislation, the remaining question is whether House Republicans will treat housing as a narrow fight over institutional buyers or as a broader test of whether Washington can respond to the cost squeeze hitting would-be homeowners across the country.
