(The Epoch Times)—The United States is on track to implement the first comprehensive housing legislation in decades.
For the past several years, housing affordability has been a significant subject across the country, with many young people struggling to achieve the dream of homeownership.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have tried to reverse the trend by advancing the 21st Century Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act of 2025.
Here is a look inside the sweeping housing package and the path to passage.
Inside the Act
While the current administration has examined strategies to expand access to the housing market, the bipartisan legislative initiative aims to bolster supply for middle-class families.
The bill’s main provision is a limit on institutional investors’ purchases of single-family homes.
Both chambers tweaked the proposal.
The Senate approved language that requires major investors who build single‑family rental homes to sell those properties within seven years.
The House’s version still aims to rein in Wall Street’s footprint in the single‑family market, but its latest draft eases the restrictions.
Lawmakers added wider exemptions for institutional buyers of newly constructed rentals, homes needing substantial renovation, and several other categories.
Other measures aim to facilitate more construction, including incentives to build more homes, convert abandoned buildings into housing, and modernize existing homes.
In addition, Washington bolstered eligible income limits for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, a federal block-grant program that state and local governments use to build, maintain, and support affordable housing for low‑income households.
Officials created a Housing Supply Framework to enable best practices in state and local zoning and land use.
The legislative text also expands banks’ authority to make public‑welfare investments supporting affordable housing. The bill raises the cap for banks’ public welfare investments to 20 percent from 15 percent.
Lawmakers removed the permanent chassis requirement for manufactured homes. The long-standing federal rule required that manufactured homes be constructed on a permanent steel frame to qualify under the federal construction code.
It also includes the Modular Housing Production Act and other reforms to streamline the production of factory-built housing.
There was also some focus on the demand side of the equation. For example, the bill establishes incentives for mortgage lenders to originate small-dollar mortgages—typically under $100,000—to address the financing gap for low-cost homes. Additionally, Congress updated rules on appraisal standards and fees for these small-dollar loans.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes reforms to Veterans Affairs (VA) housing policies. The major changes include expanding access to VA home loans, improving consumer protections for borrowers, and enhancing housing support for disabled and homeless veterans.
Congressional Path
Unlike other pieces of legislation, the housing affordability bill has moved quickly through Congress—something that President Donald Trump had requested.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill (R-Ark.) introduced legislation in December 2025. Two months later, it passed in the lower chamber by a vote of 390–9.
As it arrived in the upper chamber, senators made substitutions rather than take up the House bill. The amended legislation passed 89–10 and was sent back to the House, where it passed 396–13.
It will now be delivered to the Senate for final approval.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the bipartisan housing bill will provide relief for families nationwide.
“We worked closely with the White House and our colleagues in both chambers on a bill that puts families first and addresses the housing crisis,” they said in a May 20 joint statement.
“There’s still work to be done and we are committed to continuing to work with the White House and our colleagues in the House on a housing bill that can pass the Senate and get to the president’s desk.”
What the Industry Says
The housing industry widely lauded Congress for moving ahead with the legislation.
Shortly after the House passed the bill, the National Association of Home Builders noted that it addresses several problems facing Americans today, mainly housing shortages and affordability challenges.
“The bottom line is that the housing crisis is a supply problem,” Bill Owens, the group’s chairman, said in a statement.
“Congress can help by improving access to capital, strengthening workforce pipelines, expanding the availability of buildable lots and reducing excessive regulatory costs and permitting delays.
“If we want to make housing more attainable, we must make it easier and less expensive to build.”
Emily Cadik, CEO of the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition, stated that increasing the banks’ public welfare investment cap to 20 percent will “unlock billions of dollars in new private investment.”
“Additional changes in the updated House legislation will further strengthen our ability to finance more affordable housing to address our nation’s immense need,” Cadik said in a statement.
The House passing the Senate’s amended version would both enhance housing supply and expand access to affordable mortgage credit, says Bob Broeksmit, president and CO of the Mortgage Bankers Association.
The legislation, he said, “will help advance meaningful housing affordability solutions for our nation’s homeowners and renters.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
