Capitol Hill’s effort to address the housing crisis notched a major milestone this week after the House passed a landmark, bipartisan package of reforms.
But the political obstacles to housing reform aren’t in the House. They’re not exactly in the Senate, either. It’s that mysterious third space between the two chambers where the problems lie. And bicameralism is not currently flourishing between the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee.
Both panels still harbor a grudge about how housing politics played out in December, when the Senate tried and failed to get its ROAD to Housing Act included in the NDAA.
“We could have had a housing bill in place for months now starting to make a difference at a local level,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said. “And yet House Republicans have held it up, and Donald Trump hasn’t lifted a finger to move it forward.”
Baggage. The House product — the Housing for the 21st Century Act — is a response to the Senate’s bill. But there are significant differences between the two. The committees haven’t begun to reconcile the products yet or even had initial conversations about the two bills.
The House effort, led by Reps. French Hill (R-Ark.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), includes notable community banking policy changes. Some Senate Democrats might support those provisions, but not all.
“The House bill provisions that lengthen the time between bank examinations will not help us build a single additional home,” Warren said. “Holding housing legislation hostage to change timing on bank exams makes no sense at all. None.”
Incoming. There’s another housing policy push that isn’t covered by either housing bill so far: the effort to ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. This is a prominent priority for the White House, and the Trump administration lightly dinged the House product on Tuesday for lacking that policy.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) has said he wants to see ROAD pass the Senate “with my institutional investor ban added to it.” Moreno has promised to introduce his own legislation on that soon.
But senior Republican lawmakers aren’t convinced. Hill declined to tell reporters whether he supported the institutional investor ban on Wednesday, saying he was “going to wait and see” the results of a Treasury Department report required by a White House executive order last month.
After that, Hill said he’d “see what members have proposed, and we’ll just look through those ideas and see what we think.”
