Congress Passed a Bipartisan Housing Bill, but Homeownership Challenges Remain

In recent years, it’s fair to say that Congress only acts once an issue has become truly urgent.

But recent years have strained even historical levels of inaction.

According to GovTrack, the current Congress (the 119th) has enacted only 104 bills since convening on January 3, 2025. This is on track to be the lowest number of bills passed since GovTrack began its analysis with the 93rd Congress in 1973–1974 (the current low point is 274 bills enacted, a mark set by the preceding 118th Congress).

That brings us to the bill Congress recently passed to tackle housing affordability. Despite the bill’s overwhelming bipartisan support, legitimate concerns remain about how much it will actually move the needle.

As Edward Pinto and Arthur Gailes of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Housing Center recently wrote:

“Many in Washington are hailing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, passed by Congress this week, as the most important federal housing bill in years. The bipartisan bill targets the country’s housing affordability crisis by capping institutional investors’ ownership of single-family homes and removing obstacles to home building. It eliminates an expensive requirement to build manufactured housing on permanent steel frames, streamlines environmental reviews, and incentivizes cities to provide preapproved home designs, which will simplify things for governments, regulators, and builders. Beyond that, it likely won’t change the homeownership equation for Americans.”

Beneath the “horse-race” coverage of whether President Trump would sign the bill (he didn’t, but it still became law), it’s worth diving into the reasons why the bill won’t change the equation much.

Housing affordability has been a constant concern among policymakers and households since the pandemic, with corporate landlords becoming a primary target in debates over rising housing costs.

In Georgia, this has resulted in legislative attempts to limit large institutional investors from owning thousands of single-family homes, which would have forced divestment to get under the cap. While those state-level proposals never passed, the federal legislation restricts institutional investors who own more than 350 single-family homes from purchasing additional houses.

But crafting public policy often has unintended consequences: Early predictions are that large capital investors will shift their efforts from acquiring existing single-family homes toward constructing build-to-rent properties, since those are exempt from the ownership threshold. While this would add to the supply of homes, which is needed in all forms, it would do little or nothing to boost homeownership—the oft-stated goal of restrictions on institutional investors.

As AEI and others have noted, the bill does little to reform local land-use policy or lower mortgage rates. In defense of Congress, neither falls within its constitutional role. But the land-use provisions in the bill could be characterized more as best-practice suggestions than as an actual path to producing the increase in housing supply needed to drive down costs.

And while the bill’s financing provisions may be well-intentioned, they won’t bring down interest rates at all, much less anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels.

Lastly, this bill did not touch property taxes—another source of rising frustration, but nevertheless a function of local government. However, the good news for Georgians is that after years of trying to limit annual increases on homestead assessments, earlier this year the General Assembly capped those increases at no more than the rate of inflation.

Another significant reform that came out of the 2026 session was legislation that will tighten Georgia’s existing 45-day timeframe for local governments to review building permit applications. This measure will expedite the time to construct new homes, while also reducing some of the costs associated with construction. 

While the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act remains a high-profile story, its overall modest reforms serve as a reminder that much of the work needed to bring down housing costs remains at the local level.