President Trump on Wednesday canceled plans to sign a major new bipartisan housing bill that aims to lower costs for homebuyers and renters, saying he will not finalize the legislation until Congress passes the Republican-backed SAVE America Act, a measure that would overhaul elections nationwide and that critics say could disenfranchise millions of voters.
“The Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren centric housing bill … pales in comparison to passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump wrote on social media, using a nickname that some have described as racist to refer to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the lead architects of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. “That is what Americans, both Dumocrats, Republicans, and everyone else, care about.”
Recent polling shows that 89% of U.S. voters want the House and Senate to pass housing affordability legislation. In contrast, 52% of Americans said they support requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote — a key provision in the SAVE Act.
Earlier this month, Trump issued a presidential proclamation calling the housing bill “the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country.”
“This just doesn’t make any sense,” Warren told CNBC when asked about the president’s last-minute reversal. “You know, he could be over here trying to claim a victory lap, and instead he’s saying, ‘No, no.’ He doesn’t want anything to do with it.”
Trump could, in theory, veto the bill. But with overwhelming support for the law in Congress, it’s likely it would get overridden by a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate. And if Trump doesn’t sign the bill within 10 days of it reaching his desk — so long as Congress is in session — it will automatically be enacted, even without his signature.
By refusing to sign a bill that passed in Congress with overwhelming support, Trump is showing “a complete indifference to the cost squeeze on American families, and to genuine efforts to do something about it,” Warren claimed.
On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Republican, also described the measure as a “really important bill to lower housing costs,” while GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted that Trump would eventually change his tune and sign it.
“The president, when we go through the details of the bill, he’s going to understand that it’s a good product,” Johnson told reporters.
So what’s actually in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act? And will it really help everyday Americans keep up with the soaring cost of housing? Here’s what you need to know.
The housing crisis is real
In real terms, it’s never been more expensive to rent or buy a home in the U.S. Thirty-year fixed rate mortgages cost more than twice as much (6.5%) as they did five years ago (under 3%). Meanwhile, the median U.S. monthly rent is still 17% higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to real-estate firm Redfin, an American family needs to earn about $117,000 a year to afford the typical home available on the market today — about $30,000 more than the average U.S. household currently makes. The median new home price in the U.S. now hovers around $403,000, up 77% from roughly $227,000 in 2011, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Meanwhile, incomes haven’t risen nearly as fast.
As a result, the median age of a first-time U.S. homebuyer is now 40 — up from the decades-long norm of about 30 that persisted from the 1980s through the 2010s.
The main problem, according to experts, is supply. “There’s a general recognition that a big part of the reason why home sale prices and rents have gone up significantly is that we have under-built housing by millions of homes since the Great Recession,” Dennis Shea, executive vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., recently told CBS News.
In April, White House economists estimated that the U.S. is now about 10 million homes short of where we would be if “homebuilding and the growth of the single-family housing stock had continued at their historical pace instead of falling dramatically” after the 2008 global financial crisis.
Both parties want to do something about it
With the 2026 midterm elections approaching — and with 79% of voters saying the cost of housing as either an “extremely” or “very” important issue — lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have spent nearly a year hammering out and haggling over the details of the ROAD to Housing Act.
The final product — the most significant housing bill since 1990, according to the New York Times — represents a rare moment of bipartisan consensus in today’s hyperpolarized capital. It includes provisions from more than 60 measures previously introduced across both chambers of Congress, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center — 36 of which had both Republican and Democratic sponsors.
The lead negotiators on the Senate side were Warren and Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. Their House counterparts were Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California and Republican Rep. French Hill of Arkansas.
Trump and his administration repeatedly encouraged lawmakers to address housing affordability before the midterms. The president even pushed Congress to include one of Warren’s signature provisions: banning private equity firms from owning and buying single-family homes.
What the new bill would change
There are dozens of sections in the ROAD to Housing Act, but the big ones fall into four major categories.
Making it easier to build homes. Federal regulations can complicate the homebuilding process. The new legislation seeks to increase supply by streamlining construction. The reforms include allowing some builders to skip environmental review when a housing project will go up between two buildings that have already checked all the boxes; creating a grant program for communities to develop “pattern books” of preapproved housing designs so builders won’t need as many approvals to get up to code; and offering a framework for communities that want to reform outdated zoning regulations, which often limit larger housing developments.
Making it more cost-effective to build homes: Homebuilding is expensive. To lower construction costs — and ultimately, purchase prices — the bill gives a bigger slice of existing federal funding to places that build more housing (while reducing allocations to places that build less). It sends new dollars to communities seeking to transform abandoned infrastructure into housing. And it gets rid of a rule requiring manufactured homes to have an expensive steel frame, which makes them moveable — many are already installed onto permanent foundations anyway.
Helping people afford homes: The bill also makes it easier to to get small mortgages of less than $100,000, which help buyers afford lower-cost homes (typically in rural communities). It seeks to expand community banking by loosening some regulations (another important rural issue). It helps veterans access potential housing opportunities. And it expands the Rental Assistance Demonstration program while strengthening protections for participating tenants.
Preventing investors from driving prices up: The provision favored by both Warren and Trump is still in the bill — though it’s been slightly watered down. Now, the number of single-family homes that an institutional investor can own will be capped at 350. Investors who already own more will be allowed to hold on to the homes they already own, but future purchases will be restricted. “ROAD to Housing is the first time that Congress has said to private equity, ‘Enough: You don’t get to move into one neighborhood after another in America, and turn us from a nation of owners to a nation of renters,'” Warren explained.
How much would it actually help?
That’s what experts are currently debating. On Wednesday, Trump dismissed the ROAD to Housing Act as being of “minor importance compared to lower interest rates,” and to a degree, he’s right: Nothing would lower costs for homebuyers faster or more dramatically than, say, the return of the sub-3% 30-year mortgage. But as Scott has explained, lawmakers “don’t control the interest rate environment.” Instead, mortgage rates are tied to the yield on the 10-year Treasury note.
There’s also some tension between “existing homeowners who don’t want to see the value of their property fall and first-time buyers who want prices to come down so they can afford a house,” as Axios recently noted. Trump cited this on Wednesday while talking about why he’s “not signing” the bill.
However, lawmakers deliberately designed the ROAD to Housing Act to help new homeowners without hurting current ones. Experts say change will take time, and any price reductions will be more incremental than transformative. The goal is to steadily increase the supply of homes on the market — especially “starter” homes — while curbing the influence of corporate landlords in certain metro areas. The cost of manufactured homes could fall by “$5,000 to $10,000,” according to NPR, with “designs that could more easily incorporate a second story or basement.”
“Developers, they focus on large single-family homes or small apartments and condos,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told CBS News. “With these new incentives in the act, we should see developers building more of that missing middle housing like town homes, multi-family or smaller condo buildings.”
