Though Washington laments the slow demise of civility within Congress, bipartisanship, at least when it comes to legislating, is usually a bad thing. It only emerges when both sides want to waste taxpayer money on things nobody wants and to regulate things everybody likes.

So it’s shocking that Democrats and Republicans on the Senate banking committee united not just to take on a big responsibility, but also that the end result is a bill that is … good?

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The vote to advance the Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream to Housing Act of 2025, abbreviated to the ROAD to Housing Act, was voted through the committee unanimously, 24-0. The 315-page bill constituted the committee’s first markup of housing legislation in 17 years and its first major stab at a housing bill of this century. The bill, championed by Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the committee chairman and ranking member, respectively, is neither perfect nor comprehensive. But even if it only begins to solve the housing affordability crisis, it at least takes the problem out of the jurisdiction of monetary and financial policy and puts the onus back on Congress to do its job.

Because the nation’s housing affordability crisis is really a housing supply crisis, the most important portions of the ROAD to Housing Act are where it either allows the federal government to relax regulations or where it weaponizes federal funding to force localities to relax regulations. The bill allows the Department of Housing and Urban Development to both classify certain developments as “special projects” to lower the bar to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, otherwise known as the bane of my existence, and to delegate other properties to localities for environmental reviews. Federal housing subsidies would also be excluded from onerous NEPA reviews, and NEPA reviews for existing properties, such as empty office spaces and run-down vacant homes, would be relaxed.

The bill also redefines manufactured homes to include modular homes without a permanent chassis to be categorized alongside those with chassis, or what we colloquially call a mobile home or a trailer. The whole section on manufactured homes deregulates and expands these properties, which can be much more cheaply built in a factory than standard homes constructed on site, to specifically induce supply for lower-income earners. The bill would also condition some existing federal funds, such as transit funding and the Community Development Block Grant, to favor localities with more zoning reform, more housing development allowed, and cheaper housing costs.

The ROAD to Housing Act is a conglomeration of smaller proposals lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have written over the years, and plenty of the novel grant provisions are far from revolutionary. But the total package may just meet the moment. It finally harnesses the progressive populist wing of the Democratic Party to the broader pro-growth “abundance” zeitgeist pushed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and it also targets a key priority of the president’s.

Senate Democrats during Joe Biden’s presidency and current Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have spent years blaming the Federal Reserve for the exorbitant price of purchasing a house. The reality, however, is that much of the housing crisis isn’t a product of monetary policy’s impact on mortgages, and punting the problem of housing supply to the Senate rather than the futility of the Fed will actually help Trump solve the problem.

It’s true that after bottoming out during the peak of the pandemic, the benchmark for consumer borrowing, the 30-year fixed mortgage, has remained stubbornly high. But that’s a product of insufficient supply meeting growing demand. Consider that last autumn, when the central bank cut the federal funds rate by 1 percentage point, the 30-year fixed mortgage rose by 1 percentage point. When the Fed “cuts interest rates,” it can lower them on the short side of the yield curve, but long-term interest rates, and specifically mortgage rates, remain beholden to the laws of supply and demand, and the reality is that we have a supply crisis.

After all, today’s average 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 6.7% is actually a full point below that of the average over the past 50 years, and home ownership rates were similar back then as they are today. And because home prices themselves were so much lower, even in the Volker era of sky-high interest rates, the average monthly mortgage payment as a percent of income for the median earner buying a median-priced home was significantly less than it is today. The problem remains supply, not financing.

At barely 1%, the homeowner vacancy has remained close to a half-century low since the start of the pandemic, and the 7% rental vacancy rate is not much better. When the country had far fewer people in the 1970s, we built 19 million new housing units. But in the 2010s, we built less than half that. A Zillow analysis of newly released Census data from 2023 found that America’s total housing deficit reached an all-time high of 4.7 million units, as even though 1.4 million new homes were added to the market, we created 1.8 million newly formed families.

Most of the housing crisis’s cause isn’t even federal. But the federal solution could at least relax the local causes. To understand how, we have to look at the localities that are succeeding.

Compare the Houston metropolitan area, which authorized 70,000 new housing permits in 2023, nearly twice as many as the entire Tri-State Area, seven times as many as metro Boston, and a whopping 10 times as many as the San Francisco metro area. In turn, this corresponds to lowered costs of buying said housing: The median home in Houston is $300,000, one-fifth of the price of the median Bay Area home.

What’s the policy difference here? First and foremost, zoning regulations. Houston doesn’t have any, and where they do exist, they aren’t spread uniformly across the country.

At a local level, the problem has become partisan. States with Republican governors issued nearly 30% more housing unit permits than those with Democratic governors last year, not coincidentally coinciding with a net domestic migration that highly favors red state electoral calculations and coffers.

VoteWithYourFeet.net shows not just how many people blue states have lost to domestic emigration from 2012 to 2022, but also how much money. California, which has lost 1.6 million people to other states, has lost $102 billion in personal income, and New York, which has lost 1.8 million residents, has lost $111 billion. By contrast, the red states of Texas and Florida have gained more than 1 million residents apiece, just due to domestic migration, not foreign immigrants or new births, and gained $54 billion and $196 billion, respectively.

CONGRESS SHOULD DELIVER ON TRUMP’S PLEDGE TO END THE PENNY

In other words, if the federal government can use carrots and sticks to make zoning-restrictive blue localities act a little more like Houston, everyone will be better off. The bill could always go further, and the federal government could begin to condition all federal funds on more widespread abolition of zoning restrictions, but this legislation is a start.

So long as the federal government wants to stay a regulatory player in the housing game, it may as well use its weight to curb the degrowthers who dominate local zoning rules. Even if the ROAD to Housing Act doesn’t solve a 4.7 million-unit housing shortage overnight, it’s a start, and one that shows Congress is ready to reassert its responsibility after a two-decade abdication let local regulators run out of control.