Dem
47
GOP
53
Congress rarely gets anything done, beyond renaming post offices. It even more rarely gets something bipartisan done. So, it's something of a surprise that both chambers just passed the Road to Housing Act by overwhelming margins—88-5 in the Senate, 358-32 in the House. There are a few things to be ironed out by a Conference Committee, and then it will head to the desk of Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it.
The bill is basically an omnibus bill combining roughly 60 different ideas from both sides of the aisle. For example, some regulations that limit home construction would be removed. Localities that build lots of new housing would get extra federal funding at the expense of localities that don't build lots of new housing. There would be some new limits on private equity purchases of homes (though not as many limits as the lefties, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, wanted).
This bill is not going to do all that much in the short term. First of all, the housing market is like a barge, and moves forward very, very slowly. Second, there are a couple of key issues that are somewhere between difficult and impossible for the Congress to address. One of those is that interest rates are high, and those are controlled by the Fed. Another is that anything that reduces the prices of existing housing will make existing homeowners hopping mad. So, the focus really has to be on new housing which, again, takes time.
That said, this is a clear indication that members of both parties recognize there is a serious problem here, and if they fail to do something it is at their own peril. Further, we have argued that the conditions in the U.S. right now mirror the Gilded Age in several ways, suggesting that a new Progressive Era is around the corner. And most of the really important legislation of that era started as something relatively toothless, and then was revised by subsequent legislation to be something meaningful. Read about the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and then the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, for example. Every journey starts with a single step, and maybe, just maybe, this new law is the first step in an important new journey for the United States. (Z)