[Photo by Bloomberg/Getty Images]
Abundance Twitter was on fire last week. In case you missed it, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89-10 – a sweeping, bipartisan compromise between the main housing bills moving through both chambers of Congress. Nearly all of the bill’s provisions are exactly what we need to battle housing scarcity: new incentives for cities to build, streamlined regulations, and a fundamentally new model for how the federal government drives production.
But one provision – Section 901, which would force builders of single-family rental homes to sell them within seven years – could depress housing construction, possibly even so much that the bill becomes supply-negative in the short-term. So even though essentially 97% of the bill creates more homes, lowers costs, and creates more options for families, the last 3% threatens to undermine the good.
In the days leading up to the vote, we worked alongside Up for Growth, the Institute for Progress, and the Center for Public Enterprise to push for a targeted fix that respected some Senators’ concerns about market concentration without killing new construction. Despite pro-housing groups like ours advocating for this amendment, the Senate went ahead and passed the bill unchanged. The bill now goes to the House, where it’s likely headed for some sort of process to reconcile the Senate’s version with the House’s earlier bill. It’s still a possibility a deal gets through Congress, but it’s now much harder than if the Senate bill had gone to the House with industry and YIMBY support.
That’s why housing advocates online are fuming: the most comprehensive housing legislation in a generation is being put at risk over one provision. Two weeks ago we were closing in on the finish line; now it feels like we’ve taken a big step back.
The conversation around this provision has gotten really into the weeds, but as someone who’s worked on housing issues for the last decade, I want to encourage folks not to miss the forest for the trees. The truth is, it’s amazing that a housing bill even got this far in a divided Congress. And it was a housing bill focused on supply – rather than a regurgitation of the usual playbook driven by subsidies.
And even bigger picture, abundance advocates should look at this moment as an encapsulation of where our movement is at: completely reshaping the housing conversation, but still a long way from claiming victory.
Abundance Got Us Here
Housing has stayed near the top of the to-do list this Congress. One can say that’s because of abundance – no doubt the constant focus on housing from writers like Rogé Karma, Jerusalem Demsas, and Matt Yglesias has raised the issue’s salience on Capitol Hill. But it’s possible that even without the movement, housing would have become a political priority. Affordability broadly is a top concern for voters heading into the midterms – Pew found in January that the cost of food, housing, and health care are Americans’ leading economic worries – and Republicans in particular are feeling the pressure to deliver.
But voter frustration doesn’t tell Congress what to do about it. In the past, Congress answered this type of moment with demand-side tools: more vouchers, more tax credits, more down payment assistance. This time, it reached for abundance. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act:
Rewards cities that build. It includes the Build Now Act – a provision developed by our partners at the Niskanen Center – which says to the nation’s highest-demand areas: if you build more homes, you get more federal funding to support that growth. Fall behind, and that funding gets reallocated. It’s a completely new model for how the federal government can use carrots and sticks to drive better local housing policy.
Cuts the red tape that slows construction. The bill streamlines HOME program rules, modernizes environmental reviews for HUD-funded projects, and removes outdated regulatory barriers that add cost and delay to every project.
Makes the government more innovative. It establishes a competitive grant program for cities that try new, pro-housing reforms to help them cover the growing pains of infrastructure and service costs as communities expand.
The old question was: “How do we help people afford unaffordable housing?” We should celebrate that abundance has gotten legislators to ask a different one: “Why is housing so expensive, and what’s stopping us from building more?”
Meanwhile, abundance has created the political coalition to help answer that question: Democrats who want to make progress on housing costs, equity, and homelessness found common cause with Republicans who want freer markets and less red tape. It’s how you get the Senate’s original housing bill passing the Banking committee unanimously and the House voting 390-9 on their own housing bill. Despite our polarized politics, abundance brought both sides to the same answer: build more.
But Abundance Has More Work to Do
There’s been a lot of confusion among abundance folks and YIMBYs about why Congress wasn’t willing to make a targeted fix to Section 901, even one that would have answered political concerns about institutional investors buying up existing homes. Some of it has to do with the difficulties of switching direction at high speeds – the Senate was trying to move quickly, and when a bill has the support of 89 senators and the president, changing course is risky.
But it also has to do with what plays well on the parts of Twitter that aren’t already tuned into the details of housing policy. “Wall Street shouldn’t own homes” polls really well even if, as Demsas has written, it’s “dead wrong” as an explanation for our housing shortage. So, despite putting together a housing bill that was substantive and effective, the president and senators on both sides of the aisle ultimately prioritized the symbolism of fighting Wall Street over actually building more and helping renters.
This whole back-and-forth shows where abundance has more work to do. We may have mostly won the argument that supply-side reforms are how we lower housing costs, but that’s clearly not enough. We need to change voters’ understanding of what’s driving their housing costs, and we also need to convince elected officials that it’s smarter politically to prioritize long-term, outcomes-oriented policymaking over short-term opportunities to dunk on your ideological opponent. Voters likely won’t remember a sharp anti-Wall Street tweet, but they’ll definitely notice if rents keep rising after Congress passes a bill that claims to fix the problem. Overpromising and underdelivering just breeds cynicism and anger – which we’ve all seen hurts our politics (and can doom Democrats in particular).
What Comes Next
Suffice it to say, there is a lot more work to do – both as this bill goes through negotiations in the House, and on the broader case for abundance-driven housing policy.
But we can’t lose sight of what there is to celebrate.
Twice in the span of a week, our partners and we were able to quickly organize over 100 pro-housing organizations to sign on to coalition statements. That’s because there is real organizing infrastructure here now. We watched Senator Brian Schatz, a progressive Democrat, break with the party to make the supply-side case against Section 901 – calling the forced-sale requirement “bananas” and warning it would kill housing construction. We have both parties agreeing on the vast majority of a pro-building, pro-supply housing bill because they know voters want it and because it’s the right thing to do.
It’s no coincidence that roughly a year after Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance was published, the first major housing bill in a generation is this close to becoming law. Abundance has helped accelerate years of work by YIMBY activists and our partners at places like the Institute for Progress, Up for Growth, YIMBY Action, and the Niskanen Center.
And now we’ve learned a key lesson for the future: winning the policy argument isn’t enough. We need to win the political argument, too – changing how voters think about what’s actually driving up housing costs so that elected officials don’t sacrifice good policy for a good soundbite.