June 23, 2026
The first major affordable housing bill in years just passed the House, and President Trump is expected to sign it into law. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act passed in a huge bipartisan vote in both the House and the Senate.
Just a short time ago, the House passed it with a vote of 358 to 32, with 41 lawmakers not voting.
The Senate passed this same bill last night with a vote of 85 to 5, with 10 senators not voting.
Now, I actually told you this was coming and that this bill would likely pass in this video last week. And in case you missed that, here’s what this massive 380-page bill does.
Of course, this is the bill that caps the number of single-family homes a large institutional investor can purchase, which I will get into in a second because you guys are very interested in that. But there’s another part of this bill that I haven’t talked much about, and it’s why supporters call it an affordable housing bill.
Of course, when it comes to housing, it’s all about supply and demand. And as I’ve been reporting for years, we have a supply problem in this country that’s causing home prices to skyrocket and making things unaffordable for most buyers. Well, we live in a capitalist country, so the government can’t tell sellers how much to charge when they sell their home. So instead, Congress is tackling the other side of the problem: the supply side.
Supporters say this bill will add to the supply of affordable homes by cutting red tape when it comes to construction, speeding up permitting to build new homes, promoting the building of more duplexes and triplexes, and more manufactured homes, which are usually cheaper and faster to build, and reforming federal rules when it comes to rural housing developments and grant programs.
Speaking of grants, there’s a new annual $200 million grant program for local governments that demonstrate they are actually increasing their local housing supply. There’s another grant program that helps local governments convert empty office buildings, vacant commercial buildings, and underutilized industrial spaces into housing. And it also authorizes a new pilot grant program that gives grants and forgivable loans to homeowners for repairs and health and safety improvements. The idea is fixing existing homes and making them livable is a cheaper and faster way to increase housing supply.
And then, of course, there’s the provision that most of you care about, and that’s the part that prevents large institutional investors from owning single-family homes. The idea behind this is these investors are buying up all the single-family homes and then renting them to people, which cuts off the supply of homes for sale.
Of course, there are a ton of exceptions to this rule for investors. This law does not require them to sell any of the single-family homes they own at the time this bill becomes law. And it does not stop them from buying single-family homes after the bill becomes law either. It restricts what kinds of single-family homes they can buy and just says that they cannot own more than 350 of them. If they own 349, that’s cool. But 350? That’s a no-go.
The reality is that’s still a lot of homes, and there’s only a small group of investors that this provision will apply to. So is it really going to fix the problem? That’s up to you to decide.
Now, a lot of you mentioned in my comment section last week that these investors will just get around this rule by starting up a new company so they can keep collecting 350 homes under a different name. That is explicitly prohibited in this bill. And if the government finds out the investor is doing that, the Treasury Department and Attorney General can impose a civil penalty of up to $1 million per violation or a fine of three times the purchase price of the property involved, whichever is greater.
The bill says all of these rules will go away 15 years after this bill takes effect unless Congress decides to extend them.
President Trump is expected to sign this bill into law tomorrow during a ceremony at the Capitol.
See how your House Representative voted here.
See how your Senator voted here.
Read the bill here.
