A Housing Bill Decades in the Making — and Why San Diego Shouldn’t Celebrate Just Yet

Congress does not often give renters and first-time homebuyers something to cheer about. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — passed by the Senate 85-5 last week and now awaiting final House approval and the president’s signature — is as close to a legislative unicorn as Washington produces: sweeping, bipartisan, and aimed directly at the housing shortage that has driven costs to punishing levels across the country.

But San Diegans should read the fine print before exhaling.

The bill — a merger of the Senate’s ROAD to Housing Act, sponsored by Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and the House’s Housing for the 21st Century Act — consolidates more than 60 pieces of housing legislation into a single package. Its core ambitions are clear: make it easier and cheaper to build homes, restrict large institutional investors from purchasing single-family properties, streamline federal environmental reviews for affordable housing projects, and expand the pool of capital available for affordable housing development.

For a city like San Diego — consistently ranked among the nation’s least affordable housing markets — the supply-side provisions are the most consequential. The bill expands allowable use of Community Development Block Grant funds toward new housing construction, potentially redirecting portions of the roughly $23 million San Diego County receives annually from the program. It also creates new NEPA categorical exclusions, sparing low-impact HUD-funded projects from the multi-month federal environmental reviews that frequently delay infill development.

The investor ownership restriction has drawn the most attention nationally. The bill prohibits large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, with limited carve-outs for built-to-rent and renovate-to-sell programs. Advocates argue that Wall Street’s accumulation of residential properties has squeezed out first-time buyers, particularly in communities of color. The provision was essential to securing White House support.

Still, the bill’s limits deserve the same scrutiny as its ambitions. Housing advocates have flagged Section 901, a provision critics argue could actually reduce housing options for some families — a significant flaw in an otherwise pro-housing package. And Voice of San Diego’s analysis offered a sobering local reality check: while federal tools can increase pressure, state and local policy determines the size of the pipe. California’s suspension of CEQA reviews for urban infill projects arguably delivers more near-term housing relief to San Diego than anything in this federal legislation.

The bill must still clear the House — where leadership has signaled continued concerns — before it reaches the president’s desk. Speaker Johnson and House Majority Leader Scalise have both indicated they want further amendments, and the seven-year forced divestiture provision for built-to-rent investors nearly derailed the whole effort earlier this spring.

What is evident is that bipartisan consensus on housing affordability now exists at a federal level in a way it has not in decades. Whether that consensus produces meaningful relief for the working families who can no longer afford to live in the cities where they work is the more pragmatic and urgent question — one that San Diego, with its chronically undersupplied housing market and border-region workforce, has particular reason to keep asking.

— Jose E. Navarro, The Navarro Report / Human-Directed AI Journalism: Research, analysis, and editorial direction by the author. Drafted in partnership with Claude AI (Anthropic).