Bipartisan Bill To Tackle the Housing Crisis Picks Up Steam Among Lawmakers

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A bipartisan bill aimed at tackling the housing crisis is making headway in the Senate, drawing praise from pro-housing advocates who say it could help boost affordability for renters and homebuyers.

Republican Sen. Tim Scott and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren are backing the bill, known as the ROAD to Housing Act of 2025, which contains provisions to boost the nation’s housing supply, improve housing affordability, and increase oversight and efficiency of federal regulators and housing programs.

The 315-page bill, unveiled last week, is headed for markup in the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday morning, making it the committee’s first bipartisan housing markup in over a decade.

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“I’m proud to lead the committee in considering comprehensive legislation that will increase access to affordable housing for Americans across the country,” says Scott, chairman of the banking committee. “This is a collaborative effort that includes the work of my colleagues across the committee, and I look forward to advancing these solutions to the full Senate.”

Warren, a progressive Democrat and the committee’s ranking member, called the bill “a critical first step to bring down families’ No. 1 monthly expense: housing costs.”

The bill includes a wide range of provisions designed to reduce red tape for new housing construction, incentivize communities to build more housing, and boost accountability for federal housing regulators.

A number of pro-housing advocacy groups spoke out in praise of the bill, including the National Housing Conference, the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, and Up for Growth.

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Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi called the bill “good news” for a troubled housing market, noting that it signaled high-level efforts to formulate policy responses to the affordability crisis.

“It’s no game-changer, but policymakers are finally in the game,” Zandi wrote in a post on X.

One notable part of the bill, Section 203, calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop a “best practices” framework for local zoning and land use policies, which could be copied and implemented by local jurisdictions at their discretion.

The ROAD to Housing Act of 2025 contains provisions boost the nation’s housing supply, improve housing affordability, and increase oversight and efficiency of federal regulators and housing programs (file photo)

(Getty Images)

This is significant because zoning rules vary widely among different jurisdictions, and overly restrictive zoning rules are often cited by builders as a key impediment to new housing construction.

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At a minimum, having a national template for zoning laws would give pro-housing local politicians more ammunition to oppose cumbersome rules in their own jurisdictions, by giving them federal guidelines to point to, says Realtor.com® senior economist Joel Berner.

“Creating a set of standards for zoning could be helpful to bring attention to the issues facing many local markets, but the effectiveness of policy changes will ultimately come down to municipalities,” says Berner.

Berner also highlights Sections 207 and 208 as potentially impactful, as they call for cutting red tape around federal environmental review procedures and empowering states, local governments, and
Indian tribes to streamline their own review procedures.

“The big challenge for legislation like this is that the decision-making bodies that determine housing policy are primarily local, so it’s difficult to have top-down types of changes,” says Berner.

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