The House passed the Housing for the 21st Century Act on Monday in a 390–9 vote — a rare display of near-unanimity in a chamber that can barely agree on lunch orders. The bill, which includes more than 20 provisions aimed at expanding housing supply and cutting regulatory barriers, now heads to the Senate.

House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) and ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) co-sponsored the package, which the committee overwhelmingly approved in December. More than 50 groups endorsed the legislation, including Americans for Prosperity, the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition, and the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

That coalition alone tells you something. When a free-market advocacy group and an affordable housing lobby land on the same bill, the underlying problem is no longer theoretical.

What the bill actually does

According to The Hill, the Housing for the 21st Century Act takes a supply-side approach to the housing crunch—a welcome departure from the left's usual instinct to throw subsidies at demand and wonder why prices keep climbing. Among its provisions, the bill would modernize HUD's HOME Investment Partnerships Program and direct the Government Accountability Office to study gaps in federal housing programs.

Hill and Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) laid out the logic in an op-ed for The Hill last week:

When there aren't enough homes, prices go up. The Housing for the 21st Century Act includes real, bipartisan solutions to boost development by clearing out red tape and letting communities and local banks do their job. That's how we expand supply, lower costs and give families more options.

That framing — fewer regulations, more local authority, capital deployed through community banks rather than federal bureaucracies — is conservatism applied to a problem the left has spent decades making worse through zoning mandates, environmental review bottlenecks, and top-down planning schemes.

Speaker Johnson connects the dots

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) didn't mince words in applauding the vote:

Housing costs have soared beyond the reach of millions of American families thanks to Bidenflation, while outdated and burdensome red tape has constrained our nation's affordable housing supply and limited our ability to expand it. Today's House passage of the Housing for the 21st Century Act is a critical step toward addressing this shortage by reducing unnecessary regulatory barriers, modernizing HUD programs, and giving banks flexibility to deploy capital to increase our housing supply.

Johnson is right to name the cause. Years of reckless spending inflated the cost of everything, and housing — already strangled by decades of regulatory accumulation — absorbed the worst of it. The answer isn't more government programs. It's getting the government out of the way so builders can build and lenders can lend.

The nine who voted no

Only nine members opposed the bill — eight Republicans and one Democrat:

• Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.)
• Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.)
• Eli Crane (R-Ariz.)
• Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.)
• Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)
• Tom McClintock (R-Calif.)
• Chip Roy (R-Texas)
• Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.)
• Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas)

None of the nine have publicly explained their votes, at least not in the available record. The Republican dissenters are largely members who take a hard line against any federal role in housing markets — a philosophically consistent position, even if the political math suggests the broader caucus decided reform beats inaction. Fletcher's "no" from the Democratic side remains unexplained.

The Senate gauntlet

The bill now moves to the Senate, where it will likely face changes. A separate bipartisan housing measure — the ROAD to Housing Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — was pushed for inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act back in December but didn't make the cut.

Hill said at the time that he looked forward to working with the Senate "to send a bill to the president's desk that reflects the views of both chambers."

The Scott-Warren pairing on housing is its own curiosity — two senators who agree on almost nothing finding common ground on supply constraints. It suggests the Senate has at least some appetite for action, though appetite and legislation are very different things in that chamber.

Supply is the story

For years, the housing debate in Washington has been dominated by demand-side thinking: rental assistance expansions, down payment subsidies, and first-time buyer tax credits. All of which pour money into a market that doesn't have enough product to absorb it. The result is predictable: prices rise, subsidies are absorbed into higher costs, and politicians propose more subsidies.

The Housing for the 21st Century Act breaks that cycle, at least in principle. Its emphasis on cutting red tape, empowering local banks, and modernizing outdated federal programs reflects a basic economic reality that Washington usually ignores: you cannot regulate your way to affordability. You build your way there.

Three hundred and ninety members of the House just agreed. Now it's the Senate's turn to decide whether that consensus means anything — or whether it dies in the same procedural quicksand that buried the ROAD to Housing Act last December.