Johnson, Trump, White House reach compromise on housing bill
The House will vote Wednesday to send the housing package back to the Senate.
Speaker Mike Johnson and House GOP leaders reached an agreement with President Donald Trump and the White House on a housing affordability bill on Tuesday, according to three people familiar with the deal granted anonymity to discuss closed-door conversations.
The House, which made final changes to its text on Tuesday, is expected to pass the legislation Wednesday and send it back to the Senate for final approval.
“The White House supports the House’s housing bill thanks to the changes that were made,” said a White House official.
The updated text of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes changes to a provision aiming to limit Wall Street’s ownership of single-family homes so it now more closely resembles the Senate’s version. The House version still strikes the Senate language requiring single-family homes that large institutional investors built as long-term rentals to be sold within seven years to individual homebuyers. The Senate-passed bill contained a provision aimed at limiting Wall Street ownership of single-family homes that was much more restrictive than the House’s language. The House amended the Senate bill to significantly relax the restrictions, creating more exceptions for large investors to operate in the housing market. The new text reflects more of a compromise between the two chambers.
The House made additional changes to its bill to ensure workers on certain new federally funded housing projects are paid prevailing wages, a minimum threshold set by government standards. That provision was initially included in the Senate-passed housing bill but stripped from a previous version of the House text.
The Housing Supply Frameworks Act, which would work to establish national best practices for zoning and land use, was also added back into the House text. The Build Now Act, which aimed to use HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program to incentivize communities to build more housing was removed from the House’s version of the bill.
House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) and ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) supported the new version of the House bill.
“This bill prioritizes American families by expanding homeownership, enhancing affordability, reducing burdensome regulations that drive up costs, and increasing housing supply nationwide,” Hill said in a statement. “Importantly, it delivers on President Trump’s call to limit institutional investors from competing with the American people as they seek to purchase a home.”
Waters said in a statement that “the House has proven that bipartisan action is possible. Now it is time for the Senate to meet the urgency of this moment, work with us in good faith, and finally deliver the bold, bicameral action the American people have long demanded and deserve.”
The overall housing package aims to address housing affordability, housing supply and individual homeownership. The White House and the Senate have both previously pushed back on the House’s version of the housing bill.
Since the House released the text of its bill last week, Senate Banking ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has been a proponent of strong language to restrict large investors in housing, had worked with the White House to push for changes on the investor provision and with the building trades on the added wage language, two Senate Democratic aides said.
Warren and her staff were in touch with Democratic members in the House on the importance of fixing these provisions, including members of the Progressive Caucus, said the aides who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Last week, the White House put pressure on Congress to deliver the housing bill to the president’s desk quickly.
The House will vote on the embattled housing package Wednesday as both chambers and the White House have pushed for a housing affordability solution ahead of the midterms.