Congress nears a housing deal and the investor fight is inside it

"The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, now moving from the Senate to House reconciliation after overwhelming procedural votes, stands as one of the most serious attempts in more than a generation to confront America's housing affordability crisis. With the ballast of provisions aimed at a root cause of the crisis—housing supply constraints—the legislation presses at least several of the buttons needed to break down barriers to building more."

"A horseshoe-shaped consensus across the political spectrum reflects that the United States simply has not built enough housing for more than a decade. Depending on how it's measured and who measures, the nation is short somewhere between one million and seven million homes, and it's felt everywhere. The underbuild traces back to the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, when construction collapsed and never fully recovered."

"That persistent gap between supply and demand is one of the pivotal reasons rents and home prices have remained stubbornly unhitched from the household wherewithal of too many working households. The legislation largely reflects what housing economists and industry leaders have been saying for years: affordability problems ultimately stem from a supply problem."

Congress is advancing the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act to address the nation's housing affordability crisis. The legislation targets housing supply constraints through multiple mechanisms: streamlining federal environmental reviews, expanding financing for manufactured and modular housing, encouraging communities to accelerate housing production, updating permitting processes, modernizing federal housing programs, and widening homeownership access. A consensus exists across the political spectrum that the United States has underbuilt housing for over a decade, creating a shortage of one to seven million homes. This supply-demand gap, rooted in the post-foreclosure crisis construction collapse, drives persistent rent and price increases disconnected from household incomes. Housing economists and industry leaders attribute affordability problems primarily to supply constraints rather than other factors.

Read at www.housingwire.com