The biggest piece of US housing affordability legislation in decades became law at the stroke of midnight on Friday without President Donald Trump’s signature, once the ten-day constitutional window that opened when House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered the bill on 29 June closed without a veto. That is according to NPR, the US public broadcaster, which reported that the 21st Century Road to Housing Act cleared both houses of Congress with broad bipartisan support in June, as both parties chase credit on housing affordability ahead of the midterms.
“Compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn,” Trump told reporters in June, after cancelling the bill’s White House signing ceremony and dismissing the package as a matter of minor importance. On Truth Social on Friday morning, the President confirmed he was withholding his signature in protest at the Senate’s failure to pass the voter identification bill, which requires proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote, and remains short of the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber.
“One of the most significant pieces of housing legislation in American history” is how White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the act on X, putting the President’s own spokeswoman at odds with his big yawn verdict. Democrats hailed the biggest housing bill in decades, and Republicans claimed a win for families across the country.
Packed with more than 40 provisions contributed by both parties, the law aims to make home ownership more affordable by encouraging construction and allowing developers to skip environmental review altogether when a home rises between two projects already assessed. A new grant program will fund pattern books, collections of preapproved housing designs that need fewer approvals before building starts.
Stakes for the world’s lumber suppliers run through every one of those provisions, because timber framing went into 94 per cent of the new single-family homes completed across the US in 2024, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ analysis of Census Bureau data. Housing starts are the dominant driver of American softwood lumber demand, carrying four times the weight of broader economic growth in the latest US Forest Service co-authored forecasts.
Factory-built housing collects one of the law’s clearest savings, with the removal of a federal requirement that manufactured homes sit on a permanent steel chassis expected to cut construction costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per dwelling. Policy specialists told NPR that the change also makes more elaborate factory-built designs easier to deliver, including those with a second storey.
Corporate landlords owning at least 350 houses are now barred from buying more under a cap that Trump himself once promoted, designed to stop individual buyers from being outbid by all-cash institutional offers. Large investors hold 3 per cent of the national single-family rental market, according to NPR’s reporting, although researchers at Freddie Mac say private equity typically buys cheap homes in need of significant repairs and plays only a small part in the shortage.
Local zoning stays untouched by the federal law, which adds no new money to the budget and instead steers existing funding toward communities that approve more construction. Homebuilders have been pessimistic for three years on the back of elevated material and labour costs, with 30-year fixed mortgage rates averaging 6.5 per cent and single-family starts falling seven per cent in 2025.
“We have to take the time to celebrate that we have bipartisan champions,” said Sarah Brundage, president of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, who called the law a needed first step even though new supply will take years to reach the market. A single development can run longer than an elected official’s term, Brundage said, which is why Congress left housing alone for so long, and why she believes no candidate will run for office beyond 2028 without a housing platform.
