🔒CT lawmakers support passage of federal housing bill. What’s in it?

Connecticut lawmakers joined overwhelming majorities in both chambers of Congress this week in support of a comprehensive housing bill, a once-stalled measure that had been on the fast track this week to becoming law. But President Donald Trump said Wednesday he won’t sign it until Congress takes up his elections reform bill. It’s one of the rare pieces of bipartisan legislation that got through a divided Congress ahead of the midterm elections. It aims to address a pressing affordability issue by boosting housing construction at a time when supply is low and prices remain high across the U.S. The legislation went back and forth between the two chambers for months as the House and Senate passed their own versions. After its initial passage this winter, the bill stalled for a couple of months before the House took it up again in May. The “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act” looked like it might hit another wall, but the House and Senate reached a breakthrough deal last week. Trump had been supportive of the effort overall but had endorsed separate versions at times. Trump was expected to sign it into law on Wednesday. But he abruptly cancelled the signing because of inaction on Republicans’ SAVE America Act, which would place new requirements for registering and voting nationwide. That bill has stalled in Congress for months because it doesn’t have the votes to pass with narrow Republican majorities. But Trump’s insistence on its passage could hold up the popular housing bill. U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy joined most senators in backing the revised legislation on Monday. The House, along with Connecticut’s delegation, passed it the following day by a similarly wide margin. U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, didn’t cast a vote Tuesday night because of her son’s graduation but would have voted for the bill and has done so for past versions. “Eastern Connecticut needs more quality and affordable housing supply to meet demand and lower costs, particularly with a growing workforce in New London County,” U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, said in a statement. “There is more work ahead for Congress to deliver robust investment into housing that capitalizes on the reforms made in this bill.” The legislation, among other things, seeks to ease the construction of new homes, authorizes a pilot program to convert vacant and abandoned properties into housing and expands access to other types of housing like factory-built manufactured homes. It also made some changes to secure bicameral support. It places a ban on large institutional investors with 350 units or more from purchasing more single-family homes, with some exceptions. An original version of the bill would have required them to sell single-family housing that was built to be a rental after seven years, but that part didn’t make it into the final bill. Murphy had some reservations about the Senate’s earlier version of the investor ban. The purpose of the provision is to prevent corporate landlords from buying up single-family homes and potentially pricing out individual buyers. But he and others worried at the time about the unintended consequences on other types of investors and cutting off other housing options for Connecticut, like rental properties. Changes were made to the renegotiated bill on this front. This has been a priority for Trump, who issued an executive order to prioritize individual homebuyers over Wall Street investors and highlighted the effort during his State of the Union address. His initial effort was more restrictive and sought to limit the restriction to institutional investors with 100 housing units or more. The bill also reauthorizes and the modernizes the HOME Investments Partnership Program, a federal block grant program that seeks to boost building and buying affordable housing and provides rental assistance to low-income households. The updated bill reduced the number of years for the Community Development Block Grant’s disaster recovery program. The final bill authorizes the program for three years, which would provide grants to states and localities to help rebuild. An earlier version sought to extend the program for longer. There are also a number of provisions to address homelessness by incentivizing local solutions and helping disabled veterans secure housing through the Department of Veterans Affairs. U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th District, who works on housing issues as a member of the House Financial Services Committee, got two of his sponsored bills into the larger package. One raises the loan limit for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration to help first-time homebuyers access them, particularly for prefab and modular homes. The other measure seeks to incentivize housing construction in tight markets through the regular Community Development Block Grant program. If an area can surpass its historical benchmark of housing construction, it will receive additional federal funding. But if towns don’t meet the benchmark, they will get “penalized.” Himes said it’s not a huge boost in CDBG funding, but “it’s enough to hopefully get a variety of towns’ and cities’ attention.” He said it would affect areas in his district such as Norwalk, Stamford and Fairfield. Himes was pleased to see the legislation pass after a volatile several months. But he acknowledged that the federal government can only do so much on the issue of housing. The biggest barriers to housing construction, he said, are land use and zoning regulations at the state and local levels. “The bill is kind of a grab bag of things that the federal government can do to urge and promote the creation of housing supply,” Himes said in an interview with The Connecticut Mirror before Trump announced he wouldn’t sign it. “The primary reason housing is not getting built is local and state land use policies and zoning regulations over which the federal government has very limited control, appropriately so.” In an interview with Connecticut Public’s Abigail Brone on Wednesday, Himes said the move by Trump was “mind-boggling.” “This is a bill that will directly address affordability, which is the key concern of the American people today. And just as literally, members are gathering around a desk to watch the president sign this bill to actually deliver something on housing affordability, he says nope, you have to pass my nonsensical and awful SAVE Act before I do this,” Himes said. “You just can’t make this stuff up.” Like the rest of the country, Connecticut has suffered from a smaller supply of housing, coupled with high home prices and cost increases for building materials that were exacerbated by the pandemic and tariffs. Connecticut has seen a small uptick in affordable housing over the years. Between 2011 and 2025, it increased by nearly 17%. Chelsea Ross, who serves as executive director for Partnership for Strong Communities, said nearly half of renters in Connecticut spend more than they can afford on housing costs. She noted that one in four renters spends more than half their income on housing and that the state is short more than 63,000 homes for extremely low-income households. The Partnership for Strong Communities has been supportive of the bipartisan effort but noted when it came up for a vote in the Senate back in March that it would like to see Congress do more on rental assistance. Cost-of-living issues have become a dominant focus ahead of the November elections where control of Congress will be at stake. Republicans are looking to hold onto their narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, which have given Trump a trifecta of power to enact much of his agenda. Passage of the first major housing bill in decades could give both parties a chance to campaign on a key issue for voters. And it comes at a time when the administration is trying to wind down the war in Iran, which has led to a spike in oil and gas prices that people have felt at the pump. The bill almost got sidelined because of other legislative efforts in recent months, like the lengthy fight over government funding and Trump’s push at one point to try to the SAVE America Act to other legislation. “It was a grueling legislative process,” Himes said. “It gets harder as you approach elections to get stuff done, so I’m glad that we’re getting this one in under the wire.”