Federal Housing Bill Is a Good First Step to Address the Housing Affordability Crisis
Dustin Hare | August 12, 2026
Last month, Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing package that includes dozens of provisions aimed at addressing the housing affordability crisis throughout the country. In what is being touted as the most significant piece of housing legislation in decades, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., worked together to address an issue impacting many working families, including those in Kansas.
While the bill doesn’t create new transformative programs that will significantly reduce the current cost of housing, the bill is a great direction to target rising housing costs. It seeks to increase housing supply by jumpstarting new construction, which never fully recovered after the subprime mortgage crisis that began in 2007 and 2008. The bill does this by providing many nuanced tweaks to current policy or funding mechanisms in an effort to help builders build more easily.
Here are some of the more significant items that can be found in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.
Limiting Corporate Purchases of Single-Family Homes (Section 1001)
The component of this bill that has received the most attention is the provision titled “Home-Ownership for Main Street America,” which says large institutional investors, such as private equity funds and other corporations, cannot own more than 350 single-family homes. Violations of this new law will come with a hefty penalty “in an amount that is not more than $1,000,000 per violation, or 3 times the purchase price of the property involved, whichever is greater.”
Housing advocates across Kansas have been pushing for reform in this area, as corporate investors buying up the real estate market over the past decade has contributed to the housing affordability crisis. Lower- and middle-income families struggle to compete against large corporations who can easily outbid them with cash offers, leaving hopeful homebuyers with fewer options available.
Housing instability is another byproduct of the uptick in corporate landlords. A study in Kansas City found that corporate landlords (compared to smaller landlords) are 3.7 times more likely to file for an eviction and 1.6 times as likely to have code violations in their rental units.
This issue is especially relevant to Kansas, as a larger share of homes are being sold to large institutional investors than in most other states. In the Kansas City market, nearly 14,000 single-family homes in the region are owned by 33 companies. Just five companies own nearly 8,000 homes.
However, even with this new cap in place, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act does not require large institutional investors, who currently own about 3% to 4% of all single-family homes across the country, to reduce the number of homes in their portfolio, even if they currently own tens of thousands of such properties. They just won’t be able to purchase any additional homes.
Additionally, more than a dozen caveats are provided that exempt large institutional investors from the 350-unit rule if they are acting as responsible landlords. Some of these include allowing investors to ignore the limit if they are performing substantial renovations of homes that are not up to code, if they are allowing tenants who make their payments on time to build credit by opting in to credit reporting, and if they have right-of-first-refusal policies that provide the tenant the opportunity to purchase the home.
Unfortunately, the bill does not create an office dedicated to performing compliance monitoring within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) or elsewhere. Instead, it creates a toll-free phone number and a website that allows renters to report violations to HUD. This puts the onus on individuals and families to understand the law, to know whether their rental property is owned by a large institutional investor, and to risk retaliation to report a violation by their landlord.
Taken together, this new law won’t disrupt or reverse any investments that have been made by large corporations during their decade or more foray into the housing market. But it does serve as a rhetorical warning to the industry that they will not be able to continue operating in an unregulated environment.
Streamlining Inspections for Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 405)
An often-cited reason that landlords don’t accept Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) is because the inspection process can be tedious and cause delays in leasing to potential tenants who use these vouchers. This bill addresses inspection delays by allowing for more flexibility in how and when inspections must be done.
The biggest change allows previous inspections in the past 12 months to meet the inspection requirement. This means a landlord will not need to submit and wait for a new inspection upon application from an HCV holder. If a local housing authority has evidence that an inspection was completed on a unit in the previous 12 months, the inspection requirement will be met. Another provision allows landlords who are opting into the HCV program for the first time to request an inspection before they begin receiving applications for lease. This should relieve the burden of delay, incentivize more landlords to join the program, and create more options for voucher holders to choose from.
The bill also allows HUD to approve remote video inspections of units.
Incentivizing Communities to Build Attainable Housing (Section 208 & Section 213)
The sections of the bill titled “The Build Now Act” and the “Innovation Fund” both reward municipalities that can demonstrate they have improved their housing supply.
The Innovation Fund will provide $200 million per year in competitive grants for jurisdictions that have increased their supply of attainable housing. Communities can qualify for this grant process by demonstrating an objective improvement in housing supply growth. Grants must be used for activities that make it easier or cheaper to build, such as zoning changes and streamlined permitting processes.
The Build Now Act allocates bonus Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to be distributed to jurisdictions whose housing growth improvement rate is at or above the median housing growth improvement rate for all eligible recipients. If the housing growth improvement rate for a jurisdiction is below the median housing growth improvement rate for all eligible recipients, that community will be punished and will not receive its full annual CDBG allocation, with the annual allocation being reduced by 10%.
While it is laudable that the federal government is providing additional funding for jurisdictions that are building housing, these policies take an inequitable approach, awarding communities that have enough capital available to construct new housing while leaving behind cash-strapped communities that are unable to find the funding to build new housing.
More to Be Done to Address the Housing Crisis
While this bill alone is unlikely to significantly make housing more affordable in the near-term, there is plenty that will encourage new construction of affordable housing and start to relieve some of the strain in the market over the next several years. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is an encouraging signal that the pleas of everyday families are reaching the ears of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. We hope this legislation will be followed up with more bipartisan solutions to provide further relief to families who are facing rising costs across all their day-to-day needs.
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