We can fix the Trump/Warren build-to-rent ban

The House of Representatives to the rescue?

A single-family home for rent. (Photo by Hyoung Chang)

It’s easy to forget now, but when the ROAD to Housing Act was first unveiled last summer in the Senate Banking Committee, it was like a Secret Congress miracle.

Somewhere down the line, Elizabeth Warren had gotten supply-pilled on housing and hired a really good staffer who was networked with all the smart housing analysts. On the Republican side, Tim Scott was willing to break some taboos around local control that had prevented any prior bipartisan housing-supply initiatives from gaining traction. Their bill had some language on mortgage lending that I was surprised Warren agreed to. But she did what serious legislators do and got to yes on a package that I’m sure she felt was flawed in key respects.

The land-use provisions were limited in their impact, but kind of visionary in their outcomes-oriented design and could have laid the groundwork for more forceful action leveraging larger grant programs in the future. Other good proposals that had been floating around Congress for a while — including, of particular note to me, chassis reform — got folded in.

And while Scott understandably wasn’t going to get into an overt fight with Donald Trump about it, suddenly the Project 2025 stuff about defending single-family zoning and Trump’s promises to defend the “suburban lifestyle dream” against apartments didn’t matter to Republicans on the committee.

Initially, the big outstanding question was about the House.¹ Remarkably, though, that side ended up working out thanks in no small part to the efforts of the new Build America Caucus.

Instead, the whole thing has been derailed because Trump, with some critical assists from Warren, has ginned up outrage around the fake problem of private equity buying up single-family homes and devised a legislative “solution” that will greatly reduce the construction of new rental housing.

The possibility that the anti-supply provision will be taken out keeps being raised, only for those hopes to be dashed. The latest drama is that even though key leaders in the House want to fix the problem and send a better bill back to the Senate, Trump and JD Vance are leaning hard on them to pass the Senate’s bill as written.

But the House, for now at least, is not taking Trump too seriously and seems to be trying to fix it. They’re right to do this, and I hope they stay the course in the face of continued criticism and opposition.

From fake problems to real ones

Private-equity investors “buying up” single-family homes en masse was a very real trend in the wake of the foreclosure wave that hit the country in 2007–08.