Housing for the 21st Century Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. FLOOD. Mr. Speaker, I start by thanking our chairman, French Hill, who has shouldered the burden of helping us get this through Congress, together with our Ranking Member Waters, my colleague Emanuel Cleaver from Kansas City, myself, and all the staff that have made this happen.

At this hour, across our land, the mayor of San Diego is celebrating as is the executive director of the Huntsville, Alabama, Habitat for Humanity; the mayor of Columbus, Ohio; and plenty of folks in Nebraska and everywhere in between, because what we have here is a comprehensive, bicameral, bipartisan solution.

When I started in this role in the Housing and Insurance Subcommittee, I knew this was the number one issue in my district. Housing supply is not keeping up with demand. Tara Vasicek, the city administrator from Columbus, a city of approximately 25,000 people in Platte County, Nebraska, testified in our first Housing and Insurance Subcommittee hearing that the lack of affordable housing directly impacts economic growth, workforce attraction, and retention.

The mayor of the largest city in my district, Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, 300,000 people strong, believes so strongly in the need for affordable housing and supply that she set an ambitious goal of 5,000 units by the end of this decade.

As we wrote this bill, we thought about them and everybody else; and Mr. Cleaver and I welcomed literally hundreds of suggestions from across the country. They weren't blue ideas or red ideas. We have a lot more in common than we have opposite.

I want to read you something from the Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton. This is from No. 70. This really talks about the process. Now mind you, we had Republicans and Democrats united in the House working with Republicans and Democrats, a different version, in the Senate. Alexander Hamilton wrote: ``In the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in that department of the government, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority.''

This bill was a product of the process that Hamilton described. There were differences of opinions and jarrings of parties, I would say jarrings of Chambers, but the final bill is stronger as a result of this long and deliberative process.

It is my honor to have been a part of it. I thank again our chairman, our ranking member, and my counterpart, Emanuel Cleaver, for their work on this bill. I thank President Trump for identifying this as a major issue in September of 2025. I also want to send a special thank you to the leadership of this Chamber: our Speaker, our majority leader, and our whip. Without them, this would not be a bicameral, bipartisan bill.

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