An unlikely housing alliance moves to Capitol Hill
At a time when Democrats and Republicans can’t seem to agree on anything, an unexpected consensus is emerging across the country: America needs to build more homes.
From red Texas and Montana to deep-blue California and Minnesota, housing reform has produced unusual political roommates and scrambled traditional partisan divides.
Now, with final passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — a sweeping package aimed at increasing the nation’s housing supply and making homeownership more affordable — that bipartisan coalition of strange bedfellows has reached Capitol Hill.
A crisis both parties recognize
Leaders of both parties describe the country’s housing shortage and soaring costs in similar terms: a crisis demanding federal action.
U.S. house prices for median-income homeowners climbed 82% from 2000 through 2023, nearly seven times the 12% increase in their real incomes, inflation-adjusted, according to an April report from White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The median price of an existing single-family home is now about $434,000, more than double its inflation-adjusted level in the early 1980s, according to National Association of Realtors’ data.
A prolonged construction slowdown — especially in lower-priced “starter homes” — has left too few homes for a growing number of households, economists and housing researchers said.
The White House report found that today’s national homebuilding rate is half its pre-2008 historic pace. Had construction continued on that trajectory, the country would now have 10 million more homes.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle now call housing affordability a “crisis.”
Even President Donald Trump — who this month told world leaders at the Group of Seven summit in France that affordability is a “fake word made up by the Democrats” — used the phrase “housing affordability crisis” in a June 12 proclamation.
Trump had planned to sign the ROAD to Housing bill into law at a White House ceremony on Wednesday. But less than three hours before the event was scheduled to begin, he called it off, demanding that Senate Republicans pass a voter identification bill first.
Earlier, Trump called the bill “the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation” in the country’s history.
Even Democrats are embracing deregulation
The housing crisis has upended partisan orthodoxy at state and local levels across the country.
Democratic policymakers who might typically oppose deregulation have eased zoning and permitting rules and cut other barriers to new construction and denser housing.
Democratic-led cities like Austin, Texas; Minneapolis; New Rochelle, New York; and Palisades Park, New Jersey, have made it easier and cheaper to build, sometimes rezoning entire neighborhoods for more housing.
In some cases, the housing crisis literally hit home.
In 2022, Leslie Pool was shaping housing policies as one of the longest-serving members of Austin’s City Council. Meanwhile, her 33-year-old daughter Emily was house-hunting. She hoped to move back to her hometown. But seeing the prices, she told her mother she could not afford it.
“When the issue comes to your doorstep,” Pool told Straight Arrow, “it becomes real. We had to do something.”
Pool and her colleagues on Austin’s officially nonpartisan council — nearly all of whom she described as Democrats — approved a series of ambitious housing reforms.
The measures rolled back many of the city’s regulations, including minimum lot sizes, zoning rules and permit requirements. Deregulation helped fuel a construction boom.
From 2015 through 2024, Austin — a city of roughly 1 million — added about 120,000 homes, increasing its housing supply by 30%, according to an analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The surge in supply drove down rents and home prices. Pew found that Austin saw the sharpest drop in rental prices from 2023 to 2024 of any metropolitan area in the country.
“When it comes to local issues like housing,” Pool said, “you have very different political lines being drawn.”
Can local consensus go national?
Housing experts said the congressional breakthrough reflects a coalition that has been forming for years in statehouses and city halls.
“Today’s housing affordability crisis is one of the rare issues cutting across the partisan divide,” said Susan Wachter, a finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“The concern is bipartisan,” she told Straight Arrow, “and the housing bill is the clear proof of that.”
Alex Horowitz, project director with the housing policy initiative at Pew, said the U.S. faces a record housing shortage of at least four to seven million homes, and that has pushed rents and home prices far above historical norms.
“While states across the country are passing laws to make it easier to build more homes,” Horowitz told Straight Arrow, “until now, Congress hadn’t acted.”
The bill’s overwhelming support, he said, “shows widespread and bipartisan recognition that we need to build more homes at all price points, to improve rental affordability and bring homeownership within reach.”
“Making housing more available and affordable is one of the few remaining things people can agree on in 2026,” said Seva Rodnyansky, a research manager at Pew. “It cuts across party lines and government levels.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
