Washington has spent years talking about housing affordability. Despite the talk, federal lawmakers have failed to enact housing reforms, while ordinary Americans have been crushed by rent, mortgage payments, and a supply crunch that never seems to ease.
Now, after months of negotiating, Congress has finally reached an agreement on a bipartisan housing package that moves in the right direction. Importantly, lawmakers resisted the urge to impose the original sweeping restrictions on investors that would have undermined new construction. That restraint is not a weakness — it is exactly the realization this moment needed on both sides of the aisle.
The country does not need another round of Senate posturing, another fake crackdown, or another ideological side show. It needs more housing. That means cutting red tape, getting government out of the way, and letting builders do what Washington has made almost impossible in too many places: build. The bicameral housing agreement moves in that direction. It drops one of the worst ideas in the earlier Senate package and keeps the focus where it belongs — on expanding supply, modernizing outdated rules, and making it easier for families to find a place they can actually afford.
Earlier proposals included a seven-year divestiture rule that would have forced build-to-rent housing into an artificial selloff clock. That was a bad idea, plain and simple. Not only because institutional investors have been selling more homes than buying them since 2023, but because you do not solve a housing shortage by discouraging the very capital needed to finance and build new homes. You solve it by making it easier to add supply.
This additional supply also comes from institutional investors rehabilitating dilapidated supply. The American Enterprise Institute finds that a large share of America’s housing shortage stems from distressed and underutilized homes that sit vacant or are uninhabitable because they lack the investment needed to bring them back online. While lawmakers often overlook this reality, many of the homes acquired by institutional investors would not otherwise be restored at the same scale or speed. Without that investment, these properties do not magically become affordable housing — they remain sidelined or continue to deteriorate, further tightening supply instead of expanding it.
While the underlying factors that created the current housing unaffordability crisis are complicated, the short-term solution isn’t: housing affordability is fundamentally a supply problem. When policymakers avoid heavy-handed interventions and instead allow investment to flow, projects can move forward, and more homes can be built. That is how prices come down, not through political gimmicks, but through real increases in housing stock.
To be clear, the bill is not perfect. Spoiler alert: No piece of legislation ever is. But by avoiding overly restrictive policies on institutional investment, Congress has struck a more workable balance that supports construction rather than stifling it. That is a meaningful step forward.
A step forward from the decades of piled-on mandates, delays, restrictions, and regulatory nonsense that make it harder and more expensive to build homes. This package aims to address that problem by streamlining development, modernizing outdated housing rules, and removing barriers that slow construction.
The lesson here should not be lost on lawmakers. The federal government came close to making a costly mistake by overreaching. It should not repeat that error in future legislation. And states should take note as well. Efforts at the state and local levels to impose aggressive restrictions on housing investors risk backfiring in the same way, reducing the flow of capital needed to build new homes and worsening the supply shortage.
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Americans do not need another lecture from politicians who spent years helping create this mess. They need results. More lots. More permits. More construction. More homes.
Congress has taken a step in the right direction by avoiding policies that would have discouraged investment. Now, future Congresses and state leaders must resist the temptation to go backward. The path to affordability is clear: build more, not less, and do not stand in the way of those willing to invest in making that happen.
Jared Whitley is a longtime politico who has worked in the U.S. Senate and White House. He has a Master of Business Administration from Hult International Business School in Dubai. In 2024, he won the Top of the Rockies Best Columnist award.