Senate Passes Major Housing Bill During Shutdown

The U.S. Senate passed the ROAD to Housing Act amidst a federal government shutdown, signaling the urgency felt on both sides of the aisle to find real solutions to the housing crisis.

As Keith Griffith explains in a piece for Realtor.com, the act was passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act and “includes a wide range of provisions designed to reduce red tape for new housing construction, incentivize communities to build more housing, and boost accountability for federal housing regulators.”

According to Griffith, one part of the bill calls for the development of a “best practices” framework for zoning and land use policies that can be used as a model for local jurisdictions. “At a minimum, having a national template for zoning laws would give pro-housing local politicians more ammunition to oppose cumbersome rules in their own jurisdictions, by giving them federal guidelines to point to, says Realtor.com® senior economist Joel Berner.”

Other parts of the bill reduce red tape in federal environmental review procedures and empower states and local governments to do the same.