The House passed the Housing for the 21st Century Act on Monday by a vote of 390-9 — a margin so lopsided it barely qualifies as a vote and more closely resembles a consensus.
The bill, co-sponsored by House Financial Services Chairman French Hill (R-AR) and Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-CA), aims to cut regulatory red tape, modernize HUD programs, and expand housing supply across the country.
It now heads to the Senate, where its fate is less certain but its momentum is hard to ignore.
The Housing for the 21st Century Act takes a supply-side approach to the housing crisis, which is exactly the approach the crisis demands. Among its key provisions:
None of this is radical. That's the point. As reported by Breitbart, the bill cleared the House Financial Services Committee back in December and spent months building the kind of broad coalition that actually moves legislation. In Washington, 390-9 doesn't happen by accident.
Speaker Mike Johnson framed the bill's passage around the damage done by years of inflationary policy and bureaucratic inertia:
"Housing costs have soared beyond the reach of millions of American families thanks to Bidenflation, while outdated and burdensome red tape has constrained our nation's affordable housing supply and limited our ability to expand it.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's diagnosis is straightforward and correct. When the federal government inflates the currency and then layers regulation on top of an already strained housing market, prices don't just rise — they become untethered from what working families can afford. The answer isn't more government subsidy chasing fewer units. It's clearing the path so that homes actually get built.
Hill and Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) made the same case 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."
This is the conservative housing argument distilled to its essentials. The problem is supply. The obstacle is the government. The solution is getting out of the way.
Washington loves to slap the word "bipartisan" on anything that gets a handful of crossover votes. This bill earned the label. A 390-9 margin means virtually the entire House — across every faction, caucus, and ideological lane — agreed that federal housing policy is broken and that deregulation is part of the fix.
That kind of consensus is worth noting because it reveals something the left rarely admits publicly: even Democrats know that regulation drives up housing costs. They'll march for "affordable housing" and then defend the zoning rules, environmental reviews, and permitting delays that make every new unit more expensive. When the vote is on the record, though, the math wins.
The pairing of Hill and Waters as co-sponsors is itself a tell. These two agree on almost nothing philosophically. But housing scarcity is so acute — and the regulatory burden so obviously part of the problem — that the ideological gap narrows to near-zero when the question is simply whether the government should stop making things harder.
The bill now moves to the Senate, where things inevitably slow down. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) has already shown interest in housing reform — he co-sponsored the ROAD to Housing Act with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and sought to attach it to the National Defense Authorization Act, though it was ultimately not included.
Hill signaled in December that he aims to work with the Senate to send a bill to the president's desk that reflects both chambers. The overwhelming House margin gives him leverage. It's harder for senators to stall a bill that passed with 97 percent support on the other side of the Capitol.
Whether the Senate moves with the same urgency is an open question. But the political dynamics favor action. Housing affordability isn't an abstract concern for voters — it's the line item that dominates household budgets, the reason young families delay homeownership, and the pressure that keeps the American Dream just out of reach for millions.
For years, the left's preferred response to housing costs has been demand-side intervention — subsidies, tax credits, rent control, government-built units. Every one of these approaches treats the symptom while ignoring the disease. You cannot subsidize your way to affordability when the fundamental problem is that not enough homes exist.
The Housing for the 21st Century Act gets the economics right. More supply. Fewer barriers. Local banks and communities are empowered to build rather than be buried in federal compliance paperwork. It's not a glamorous policy. It won't generate protest signs or viral moments. But it's the kind of legislation that might actually result in houses being built, which, in the end, is the only thing that brings prices down.
Three hundred and ninety members of the House understood that on Monday. Now it's the Senate's turn.