In a city defined by gridlock and dysfunction, last week something extraordinary happened: Congress passed productive, pro-growth, bipartisan legislation that reduces government barriers to prosperity.
Last Monday, the Senate voted 85–5 to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The following day, the House followed suit, 358–32. Despite some theatrics from President Trump, the bill will become law in short order. By any measure—and particularly against the backdrop of today’s Washington—this is a genuine legislative miracle.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the most significant federal legislation in decades to expand housing supply. It streamlines environmental reviews, removes regulatory barriers to construction, and establishes pre-approved home designs to accelerate permitting, among other reforms. As lead bill sponsors Senators Tim Scott (R., S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a rare joint statement, the bill is “an important step toward addressing America’s housing affordability crisis and giving families across this country a fair shot at the American Dream.”
FREOPP’s mission has always been to advance policy that uplifts Americans on the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder through limited government that can achieve bipartisan support. Unfortunately, in addition to Washington’s general dysfunction, most bipartisanship in D.C. only serves to further increase spending, grow government, or score populist political points without solving real problems—or all of the above.
This housing bill is different. It is not perfect, and much of the housing affordability issue ultimately needs to be addressed at the state level, which FREOPP is actively working on in multiple states. But this bill takes several genuinely productive deregulatory actions that will reduce the costs and burdens of building new housing in this country. It addresses a significant source of cost-of-living anxiety for struggling Americans by getting some government barriers out of the way. That’s objectively good news, and several members of Congress from both parties deserve credit.
FREOPP meaningfully contributed to the effort, including publishing a timely white paper on the origins of the housing shortage, engaging in coalition efforts across the ideological spectrum, and meeting with key figures on the Senate Banking Committee and in House leadership.
But beyond the vote counts and headlines, it’s important to understand what made this rare success possible. Based on my prior experience as a congressional committee policy staffer and several years advocating for pro-growth policy as a government affairs professional, in addition to fruitful conversations with current senior congressional staff, below are the primary factors I believe helped make the housing legislation a reality.
Americans wanted it—even if they couldn’t name the policies
The foundation of any durable bipartisan policy success is public demand. On housing, that demand is overwhelming and cross-partisan. Polls consistently show that Americans across the political spectrum view housing affordability as one of the most pressing kitchen-table issues of our time. The median U.S. home price is more than $400,000, up 77 percent from 15 years ago. Our white paper showed how that is fundamentally a supply issue: the nation has faced a long-term decline in the number of new housing units started and completed over several decades as the U.S. population continued to grow.
Voters may not have opinions on environmental review timelines or chassis requirements for manufactured homes. But they know that they can’t afford a house and want that to change. That broad public sentiment gave legislators on both sides of the aisle the political space to act and the incentive to find a deal.
Trump wanted it—enough, at least
Presidential engagement with legislation is a double-edged sword, particularly from this president. Too much White House involvement can polarize an otherwise winnable coalition, while too little effort fails to provide the legislative grease a difficult bill requires.
On the 21st Century ROAD Act, the Trump Administration initially threaded that needle reasonably well. The president publicly voiced support for the effort, obviously critical for Republican majorities in both chambers. At the same time, he largely stayed out of the policy weeds, allowing those in Congress who know the details to work it out.
Personal trust at the committee level
Punchbowl News has reported on what was perhaps the most underappreciated ingredient in this success: a genuinely high degree of personal trust between the relevant committee chairs and ranking members. Senators Scott and Warren built a working relationship on the Senate Banking Committee that made the bill possible. The same was true in the House, between Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill (R., Ark.) and Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D., Calif.). All were committed to a bipartisan and ultimately bicameral deal that could become law.
None of this can be manufactured. It is the product of years of working together, treating each other’s motivations and concerns seriously, and maintaining the basic respect that makes legislative compromise possible. In a polarized era, this kind of relationship between ideological counterparts is rare and its value cannot be overstated. That’s not to say it’s possible on every issue—nor should it be, necessarily—but it was critical here.
Industry got off the sidelines
Think tanks and advocacy organizations are simply not enough to move a bill of this magnitude. This bill succeeded, in part, because it was backed by a substantial and well-organized industry coalition: real estate groups, homebuilders, developers, and broad-based business organizations lobbied actively in favor of the legislation. That added real political weight to the effort.
Just as important, the bill’s proponents worked to bring along, or at least neutralize, would-be opponents. Some industry-specific groups had concerns about particular provisions, which negotiators were willing to make targeted adjustments to address, such as those pertaining to institutional investors. Getting a deal across the finish line often requires letting different factions win some small battles so they don’t blow up the whole thing. That’s what happened here.
Congress focused on areas of agreement and avoided the third rails
When it came to the details of the policy, the legislation’s architects made a deliberate and disciplined choice: work on the things both sides could agree on and leave the politically toxic issues for another day.
That meant focusing on supply-side reforms—reducing regulatory barriers to building homes, speeding up permitting, opening pathways for manufactured and modular housing—rather than wading into fights over rent control, housing voucher expansions, or other demand-side proposals that tend to break along clean partisan lines. The coalition that emerged was ideologically broad, including free-market groups like FREOPP, YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) organizations, real estate developers, business associations, and affordable housing advocates. That breadth and the massive bipartisan vote tally in both chambers were only possible because the bill’s core was built on the least-contentious common ground.
This discipline deserves to be recognized as a genuine strategic achievement, not an accident.
The media let it breathe
The lack of media attention in the early days of this effort is easy to miss. But the press silence about this bill until it was nearly across the finish line was likely a contributing factor to its success.
Political media is incentivized to frame every issue as a conflict, and partisan audiences on both left and right are primed to respond to outrage. Bills that get turned into partisan flashpoints tend to collapse under the weight of that attention, not least because they ultimately need bipartisan support to pass the Senate.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act avoided that fate. By the time reporters were focused on it, the key players in both chambers were committed to finding a deal that could become law.
A word about FREOPP’s role
Despite the free-market logic undergirding it, housing deregulation has historically been the domain of left-leaning YIMBY organizations and urban planning reformers because cities and states have been the epicenters of the U.S. housing shortage. Free-market, right-of-center voices have been largely absent from this conversation, which has limited both the ideological diversity of the housing reform coalition and its ability to attract Republican support.
FREOPP has worked to change that at both the federal and state level. In the lead-up to the bill’s passage, we published a white paper, The U.S. Housing Shortage and How Zoning, Building Codes, and Permitting Created It, which laid out the regulatory origins of the crisis from a free-market perspective. We engaged both publicly and privately in ideologically diverse coalition efforts. And we met with key figures—including the Senate Banking Committee and House leadership—to signal that housing deregulation has a natural home in the free-market tradition, and that right-of-center organizations were working across the aisle to achieve it.
We believe that housing is critical to our mission, and free-market organizations like FREOPP will be critical to policy successes. We have thus committed significant resources to promote policies that will expand American housing supply.
What comes next
The obvious question is whether any of this can be replicated.
The honest answer is: not easily. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act benefited from a rare combination of circumstances.
The harder challenges on the legislative horizon—immigration, entitlement reform, fiscal sustainability—are far more politically charged, far more entrenched, and far more likely to activate exactly the partisan dynamics that housing reform managed to avoid. The playbook from housing will not translate directly.
But it does offer some lessons worth holding on to: that public demand, trust between key legislators, coalition breadth, and legislative discipline all matter enormously.
As always, FREOPP will continue doing what we set out to do ten years ago: developing rigorous, free-market policy solutions to America’s most pressing problems holding back Americans on the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder and working across ideological lines to build the coalitions necessary to turn those ideas into law.