A bipartisan pair of senators introduced a bill to address the housing affordability crisis that they are touting as “comprehensive” and “historic.”
The ROAD to Housing Act of 2025, introduced Thursday by Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, lays out steps to boost the country’s housing supply, improve housing affordability and help remove regulatory barriers for development.
Scott and Warren are the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. The committee is scheduled to hold a session on the bill Tuesday morning.
“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,” Scott said in a written statement.
A focal point of the bill is helping to limit the barriers to developing housing at the state and local levels. It would develop a framework for zoning and land-use policies, helping communities identify and overcome hurdles to housing development.
Some guidelines include eliminating parking minimums, allowing duplexes and triplexes by-right, reducing lot size requirements and maximizing floor-area ratios.
To spur housing development, the bill aims to increase production in opportunity zones and transit-oriented communities, and it has a focus on modular and manufactured housing development.
The bill’s 60 provisions also include plans to reform housing counseling programs, to increase reporting requirements for local housing agencies receiving federal grants, and to help families save to become homeowners.
“With this historic bipartisan bill, we are taking a critical first step to bring down families’ number one monthly expense–housing costs,” Warren said in a statement.
“I’ve been calling on Congress to address our nation’s housing shortage for years, and I’m proud to work with Chair Scott and our entire Committee to put forward legislation that will boost housing supply, reduce homelessness, and expand homeownership for families.”
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law, expanding tax programs that have been used to produce more housing. The bill made opportunity zones a permanent fixture in the tax code and expanded the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program — one of the primary tools for creating affordable rental housing.
The Trump administration’s proposed cuts to federal low-income housing programs like Section 8 are putting downward pressure on affordable supply, with developers and lenders pulling back on projects. The country’s supply of affordable housing is far below the need, with a study in March from the National Low Income Housing Coalition finding a shortage of 7.1 million homes for extremely low-income renters.