Providing for the Concurrence By the House in the Senate Amendment to H.R. with Amendment

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H. Res. 1299, amending H.R. 6644, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, sponsored by Chairman Hill and me.

Tomorrow, the House has a historic opportunity to pass an improved bipartisan housing package, negotiated in partnership with Chairman Hill and me, and with the input of many House Democrats.

Mr. Speaker, our housing bill is the most comprehensive housing reform bill in a generation and is a huge step toward finally addressing the affordable housing and homelessness crises in our country.

Let me make it clear, and let me take a moment to remind everyone what is at stake or who we are trying to help. The age of a median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old. That is largely because the average cost of a single-family home has skyrocketed, and wages have not kept pace. In fact, 22 million households spend over 30 percent of their paycheck on rent, and 12 million spend over 50 percent on housing. What is most shameful is that nearly 800,000 people experience homelessness on any given night. This is unacceptable, and we must act now.

The House first passed H.R. 6644 back in February. A month later, the Senate amended our bill, stripping out numerous House provisions that would address real problems in the housing market. However, the Senate also added a poorly drafted ban on large institutional investors buying new single-family homes.

I say this not as someone who is a fan of private equity ownership of these homes, but as someone who was concerned that the Senate's drafting was unconstitutional and could lead to thousands of families and persons living with disabilities being evicted, students and servicemembers without housing options, and private equity being incentivized to use certain types of contracts with tenants that have been rife with abuses.

For this reason, I called on the Senate to join us in a conference to resolve our differences. While I am disappointed that our Senate colleagues chose not to conference with us, Chairman Hill and I just kept on going. We pressed on, making those critical improvements to restore the legislation to its intent to address the housing crisis.

To be clear, the consequences of simply passing the Senate's bill were stark. The Urban Institute concluded that 72,000 housing units would not be built as a result of the Senate's bill.

Even more alarming, the Senate's language also threatened tens of thousands of families with eviction.

Mr. Speaker, before I go on, I must say that the process to get here today has been less than ideal. That is an understatement. Chairman Hill, the Speaker, the White House, and I were making changes to this text right up until the last minute.

While I support our final agreement, we must inform our colleagues about how this bill has changed since it was posted on Friday, as they will be voting on it tomorrow, so I am going to describe those changes here.

First, the bill removes section 204, which was the Build Now Act.

Second, we added a new section 107, called Housing Supply Frameworks.

Third, section 208, the Housing Innovation Fund, now sunsets after 7 years instead of 5 years.

Fourth, we added language ensuring prevailing wage requirements under the Davis-Bacon Act apply to sections 102 and 106 of this bill.

Fifth, we are revising section 1001 of the bill, which relates to private equity ownership of single-family homes, by replacing our text with the Senate-based language while removing the divestment requirement, changing the definition of build-to-rent, and inserting a renter hotline that requires HUD to respond to renter complaints.

Mr. Speaker, this revised House package of needed housing reforms preserves more than 90 percent of the Senate's bill, while strengthening it by adding numerous, critical House-passed, Democratic- led housing and community banking provisions. As a result, we will be providing more relief and support to millions of families and communities all across the Nation.

Mr. Speaker, there is broad recognition in this Chamber of the problems in our housing markets. We need comprehensive reforms at the Federal, State, and local levels, along with a commitment by everyone to get America building housing again.

How do we do this? We do this by: creating a pilot to increase access to small-dollar mortgages, especially in rural areas; allowing housing cooperatives, a type of affordable housing option, to participate in Federal programs; creating local databases about unused, government- owned land--very important; increasing access to more family-sized affordable housing units; and adding in community bank and credit union reforms so that these small institutions can help.

These and so many other reforms in this bill are a huge first step toward finally addressing the housing crisis in this country.

Finally, the Senate had a temporary ban on central bank digital currencies, that is the CBDC. This is the status quo we have in effect today as Trump's new Fed Chair has stated that he will not issue a CBDC during his tenure. More importantly, this temporary ban is only partial and will still allow the Fed to study other forms of CBDC, like the ones that more closely parallel how currency is used in our economy.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to join me in passing this bill. I will just say that we have learned an awful lot over a number of years about what we could do to create some real opportunities. We are now using our experiences working on housing bills to interject into how we are going to be able to get more housing for all of those who are in desperate need and to get the homeless off of our streets.

We have learned a lot. You are going to hear in this bill about how we are learning about land that is owned by cities and counties for years that they could get rid of and don't have to do it for market value, on and on and on.

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud, even though this has been a real, real labor--I want to say of love, but it has been a real labor, maybe not of love but something that really had to be done.

I think we have finally made these meaningful steps to our Nation's housing crisis and strengthened our community banks.

Mr. Speaker, I ask everyone to please support this bill. I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. WATERS. He is someone who worked very hard to make some changes in the HOME program and that when some questions were raised about Davis-Bacon, he was right there to ensure that they were protected. I thank him so very much.

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Ms. WATERS. Velazquez), the ranking member of the Small Business Committee and an author of several provisions of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I say to Chairman Hill that in light of changes we agreed to today, I want to take a moment to make clarifications about the authority the Treasury has and should use related to the provisions banning large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes.

Under our bill, the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the heads of HUD, FHFA, and SEC, may issue regulations to minimize market disruptions and negative impacts on consumers and communities.

He and I both firmly agree that the bill allows Treasury to do this and that Treasury must use this authority to issue regulations and clarify the following things.

First, the bill was not intended to impact military housing, student housing, disability housing, or LIHTC-supported housing, as defined in our earlier May 15, 2026, posted draft of this bill.

This bill was also not intended to include or impact nonprofits or community land trusts that purchase single-family homes. These entities are not for-profit, large institutional investors.

In addition, large institutional investors are still prohibited from buying properties with land contracts, again, as defined in our earlier May 15 posted draft. These are not subject to landlord-tenant laws and are harmful to renters. Large institutional investors should only be allowed to purchase foreclosed, federally backed properties after individuals and approved nonprofits have been given the first chance to buy them through a 30-day first look period, as described in our earlier May 15 posted draft.

Given our congressional intent, Treasury should use its authority to address these concerns and to minimize market disruption and mitigate negative impacts on consumers and communities.

Mr. Speaker, I know Mr. Hill agrees with me on all of this, as we have discussed, and I would love for him to share his thoughts with our colleagues on this also.

I yield to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Hill).

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Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I reclaim my time.

I approve of everything Chairman Hill said, and I thank him.

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Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, let me just say that I appreciate Mr. Hill's support of some of the efforts that we made. Because of his background in banking and his experience, he understood exactly what we were talking about when we talked about the banks being able to do smaller loans and to provide mortgages for homes that cost a lot less than the millions of dollars.

It was because of his background and his experience that he understood right away that we want this pilot program so that we can show everybody that it is impossible to be able to have a mortgage if, in fact, you are buying a home that costs less than millions of dollars. I thank him very much.
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