Dive Brief:

• A bipartisan bill that seeks to expand access to affordable housing and increase housing production through regulatory reform advanced through the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Tuesday. 
• The Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act would ease some environmental regulations to speed up housing development and provide incentives such as grants for localities to embrace “pro-housing” policies that “remove regulatory barriers to the construction or preservation of housing units, including affordable housing units.”
• The bill has support from housing advocates, including from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which called it “a landmark piece of legislation that addresses the urgent need to make substantial movement on the national housing crisis.”

Dive Insight:

Mayors have been sounding the alarm on the U.S. housing crisis “for years now,” Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Andrew Ginther said earlier this year. Ginther is immediate past president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and chair of its Housing Task Force. 

The conference’s June 2025 survey of mayors found that 51.5% believe housing affordability in their cities will worsen in the next year, and more than 94% reported their residents are “dissatisfied or very dissatisfied” with housing affordability. 

Support from the federal government to address the crisis seemed in doubt after the Trump administration in May announced plans to slash Department of Housing and Urban Development funding by more than $33 billion for the 2026 fiscal year.

The ROAD to Housing Act — reportedly the first housing bill to pass through the Senate committee in more than a decade — contains at least 27 pieces of previously introduced legislation, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. It could offer major solutions cities have been looking for, according to the Conference of Mayors.

“The bill lays the groundwork to address the nation’s urgent need to boost housing supply, improve housing affordability, and increase oversight and efficiency of federal regulators and housing programs,” Ginther and Conference of Mayors CEO Tom Cochran said in a letter to the Senate Banking Committee chairman, Tim Scott, R-S.C., and ranking member, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Among its provisions, the bill would

• Exempt certain housing projects from environmental reviews previously required under the National Environmental Policy Act. 
• Eliminate the permanent chassis requirement for manufactured homes, which advocates call a regulatory burden to new construction.
• Require the development of guidelines on state and local zoning within three years to “support production of adequate housing to meet the needs of communities and provide housing for individuals at every income level.”

The legislation largely focuses on regulatory changes, but it also establishes an Innovation Fund, a five-year, $200 million grant program for entities that have found demonstrable ways to expand housing supply in their jurisdictions. HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program, which distributes approximately $3.5 billion annually, would also be refocused to favor “localities with above-median housing costs and above-median rates of growth” and put new reporting requirements for grant recipients in place, Reason reported.