Senate passes bipartisan housing affordability bill

What happened

The Senate on Thursday approved bipartisan legislation aimed at making housing more affordable and accessible. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), passed 89-10. The legislation’s “roughly 40 provisions” encourage local governments to expand housing development, make it easier to build and finance modular and manufactured housing, remove regulatory barriers and bar institutional investors from buying single-family homes, with exceptions, CNN said. “Taken together, it’s one of the most significant housing initiatives in three decades.”

Who said what

“The age of affordability is now and the solution to affordability is, in fact, us,” Scott said before the vote. “We need more housing of every kind,” Warren said, and this bill “will help drive down prices.” The housing vote “marked a rare moment of bipartisanship” in a “deeply divided” Congress, Reuters said, and it allows lawmakers in both parties to “campaign for re-election this year by highlighting efforts to ​ease the burden of high living costs.” But first it has to pass the House, which approved a narrower housing bill in January.

Legislation “aimed at making housing more affordable should be a slam-dunk for Republicans’ affordability message,” but instead it’s “exposing GOP disarray on the very cost-of-living issues voters care most about,” Politico said. President Donald Trump, who pushed for the institutional investor ban, could “step in to break the impasse” between Senate and House Republicans, but he told House Republicans this week “that nobody cares about housing issues.”

What next?

Trump has “indicated his support” for the Senate bill, The New York Times said, but he has also “cast considerable doubt in recent days on its chances of enactment,” saying he won’t sign any legislation until Congress sends him strict voting restrictions unlikely to pass in the Senate.