Landmark Housing Bill Set to Be Sent to Trump After He Abruptly Canceled Signing

The landmark 21st Century Road to Housing Act will be sent to President Donald Trump, a day after he abruptly canceled signing it.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to Realtor.com® that Johnson will formally submit the bill to Trump. Once he receives it, the president has 10 days to either sign or veto the bill. If he takes no action while Congress is in session, it will automatically become law.

The bipartisan bill is one of the most comprehensive housing bills in decades.

The House passed it in a 358-32 vote on Tuesday night, one day after the Senate easily passed the bill by a vote of 85-5. The bill’s 45 provisions are aimed at cutting red tape and encouraging the construction of more homes.

That includes constraints on institutional investors in the housing market, new banking rules aimed at promoting mortgage lending as well as measures to cut red tape and speed up homebuilding.

But just as the two parties were hailing the bill as an act of bipartisanship to cut housing costs, Trump suddenly canceled a bill-signing ceremony on Wednesday. He called the bill “of minor importance” and demanded Congress pass an unrelated voter identification bill, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.

Housing reform in limbo

The move canceling flummoxed Washington and frustrated lawmakers. Johnson—who was in the middle of a press conference touting the bill when Trump announced his intentions on a Truth Social post—said he would follow Trump’s lead.

“We’re delaying this. As you know, he has a window of time before he has to sign a bill, and he’s going to use a little bit more of that window of time, and we’re going to go through this together,” Johnson said Wednesday.

The president, when we go through the details of the bill, he’s going to understand that it’s a good product,” Johnson later said. “And certainly something that fulfills his promises to bring down the costs.”

Democrats quickly castigated the decision.

“President Trump once again chose political gamesmanship over meaningful solutions for the American people,” House Financial Services ranking member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), one of the bills major proponents, said Thursday.

Democrats have also staunchly opposed the SAVE America Act. Sen. Reuben Gallego (D-AZ) said Wednesday he would vote against all Republican-led House bills that come before the Senate until Johnson submitted the bill.

Jay Shuman, a Nelson Mullins attorney who focuses on real estate, tells Realtor.com he’s already been fielding plenty of calls from clients trying to figure out how to react. The delay complicates things, especially for the developers impacted by the investor ban.

“Developers are risk-averse by nature,” Shuman said. To have this uncertainty out there among all the other headwinds they may be facing in terms of interest rates and construction costs, it just makes for a more challenging environment.

What’s in the 21st Century Road to Housing Act

The final version of the bill includes 45 provisions across 381 pages with major implications for housing. Many of the measures are aimed at boosting housing production to address a massive national shortfall.

Realtor.com® estimates that the country has a shortage of more than 4 million homes, as a consequence of more than a decade of building fewer homes than were needed to meet demand.

Among other things, the legislation aims to incentivize homebuilding by establishing policy guidelines and best practices, streamlining environmental review, and improving existing programs including tying community development block grants to housing outcomes,” says Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale. This last provision enables the Federal government to put its finger on the scales of policy making at the state and local level, where many of the policy and regulatory hurdles to homebuilding exist.

The legislation also makes changes to make it easier to build and finance both manufactured and modular homes, which could bring down construction costs if used more widely.

Key provisions of the bill include:

• Restricting corporate buyers: Blocks Wall Street firms and large institutional investors from mass-purchasing single-family homes, backing the ban with steep financial penalties.

• Zoning reform: Creates a $200 million grant program to reward cities that eliminate restrictive zoning, while penalizing slow-growth communities by cutting their CDBG funding by 10%.

• Cutting regulatory red tape: Accelerates construction timelines by waiving lengthy NEPA environmental reviews for low-impact HUD projects and streamlining repetitive property inspections.

• Expanding mortgage access: Launches a HUD pilot program to expand access to small-dollar mortgages under $100,000 and increases the amount of private bank capital that can be invested in local affordable housing.

• Modernizing factory-built housing: Updates FHA lending standards and draw schedules to give manufactured and modular housing financing parity with traditional, site-built homes.

• Disaster recovery fixes: Permanently authorizes the CDBG-Disaster Recovery framework for faster post-disaster rebuilding and protects low-income rural tenants from losing rental assistance when a property’s underlying mortgage matures.