Yesterday, Congress completed action on that rarest of occurrences in the Trump era, a major bipartisan bill. The housing bill, with 47 housing supply provisions, passed the Senate on Monday, 85-5, and was approved by the House Tuesday, 358-32.
Trump had planned to sign it today, but abruptly put off the signing ceremony and said that he won’t sign the housing bill until Congress passes the so-called SAVE Act, a Trump obsession that would unconstitutionally give the president control of voting systems that the Constitution reserves to the states.
Trump has also held renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act hostage for passage of the SAVE Act. But the votes are not there to pass his pet bill, and Trump’s latest threat sets up a showdown with Hill Republicans who are running out of patience with their president. There are more than enough votes to pass the housing bill, an object of Republican pride, with or without Trump’s support. Trump did not threaten a veto, and there are votes to spare to override one. And under the Constitution, if the president takes no action, the bill automatically becomes a law after ten days.
The bill, called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, eases regulatory barriers to new housing construction, makes it easier to build factory housing, and creates several pilot programs offering grants to localities that enact creative programs to increase housing supply and resist NIMBY barriers.
The act creates “a $200 million annual competitive grant program for local governments and tribes that demonstrate measurable increases in housing supply, incentivizing reforms such as streamlined permitting, density bonuses, and zoning changes.” HUD is directed to “publish guidelines and best practice frameworks for state and local zoning and land-use policies.”
The mostly progressive bill could pass because the stars were in rare alignment in several respects. First, with the economy tanking and inflation as a top voter concern, Republicans desperately needed a high-profile win that displayed them as doing something for beleaguered consumers. Gas prices are high because of the Iran war. But housing is chronically unaffordable. The Republican need for this bill gave Democrats more leverage than unusual.
Secondly, Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and champion architect of improbable bipartisan collaboration, has a good working relationship with her Republican counterpart, Chairman Tim Scott of South Carolina. The Senate bill, mostly Warren’s work, was far better than the House counterpart.
What delayed and nearly killed the bill was one key provision demanded by Warren: a ban on private equity buying and speculating in single-family homes. After months of jockeying, the final provision is very close to Warren’s. It bars large institutional investors that already own 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional properties.
In this, Warren had an unlikely ally in President Trump, who must have decided that this ban was a winning issue. Last January 20, Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to block private equity purchases of single-family homes. He declared, “People live in homes, not corporations. My Administration will take decisive action to stop Wall Street from treating America’s neighborhoods like a trading floor and empower American families to own their homes.” (Wonder which of Trump’s faux-populist advisers wrote this?)
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In another oasis of bipartisanship, Warren wrote a New York Times op-ed yesterday with Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno calling for restoring Social Security to solvency by lifting the cap on Social Security taxes. Ohio seems to be turning bluer this year with former Sen. Sherrod Brown narrowly leading Jon Husted in the race to take back his old Senate seat. The op-ed is another sign that Republicans need stances that put them on the side of regular working people.
These and other pocketbook issues, as well as recent primary victories in New York and elsewhere, demonstrate that progressive economics is popular. Imagine what else can be accomplished when Republicans no longer control Congress and Trump is no longer president.
(One sour note in the housing bill: an extraneous rider promoted by the crypto industry that prohibits the Federal Reserve from developing a central-bank digital currency. Enough crypto-afflicted Democrats in both houses supported this provision that it stayed in the final bill. As this Prospect piece shows, crypto continues to be a politically potent plague.)
But for all of its creative benefits, as Sen. Warren pointed out, the housing bill is barely a down payment on what’s needed. It will increase housing supply around the margins, but the housing shortage is so massive and prices so high that it is unlikely to transform housing markets.
One of its weaknesses is that it spends no serious money; its new programs are modest demonstration projects. Republicans would not sign on to a major spending bill because massive deficits resulting from tax cuts for the rich and huge increases in military spending have soaked up federal fiscal capacity.
Even so, it is good to see Republicans playing on Democratic turf and progressive Democrats laying the groundwork for their next turn at governing.
