Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is expressing guarded optimism that a sprawling affordable housing bill championed by her and Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina will become law despite President Donald Trump’s unexpected refusal to sign it earlier this week.
Trump was poised to sign the bill into law before abruptly reversing course and saying he would only sign it if Congress also passed a strict voter ID bill the president has been pushing for months.
“This is now a bill that has passed the Senate 85 [to] 5, okay? You just don’t get those in the United States Senate,” Warren said in an interview on GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “It passed the House by a similar overwhelming majority. Ninety percent of the House voted in favor of this.”
“So this is Republicans, Democrats, and the reason’s it’s just a damn good bill!” Warren added. “The reason is because we have a housing crisis everywhere in America. The reason’s because this is a bill that is helpful in rural areas, in urban areas, all aiming toward bringing down the cost of building new units of housing. Because that’s our answer: You gotta build more housing.”
The sprawling 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes a huge range of provisions, including restricting the ability of corporate investors to buy large blocs of homes to rent out, loosening regulations to streamline home construction, and making manufactured homes more affordable.
In her GBH News interview, Warren said she considers some of the bill’s provisions more valuable than others, but that including a wide range of policy proposals is precisely why the bill passed both the House and Senate by such overwhelming margins.
The bill could still become law despite Trump’s about-face. If House Speaker Mike Johnson presents the president with the bill, which Johnson has said he plans to do, the president could shift gears and sign it into law after all. He could also veto it, though it passed both the House and Senate by veto-proof majorities, thereby testing the willingness of congressional Republicans to override Trump on a high-profile issue. In addition, the president could take no action when presented with the bill. If Trump takes this route, the bill would become law without his signature after ten days.
Warren acknowledged that, for the most part, the bill would not immediately make housing more affordable across the U.S., an observation that housing advocates who spoke with GBH News also made.
“This is a bill about giving communities more tools to address the housing shortage on many different fronts,” said Eric Shupin, CEO of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, who stressed that the bill, though worthwhile, is not a panacea.
“It tries to make every step of creating housing opportunities work a little bit better, whether that’s planning for more housing, financing it, building it, and preserving the housing we have,” he said.
Ben Levine, housing attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, said the bill’s focus on free-market techniques is likely another reason it passed with such strong support.
“[The bill] wasn’t going to necessarily build more public housing, like add more subsidies, but it was going to be — and this is why probably it became a bipartisan bill, is that it was, you know, market-based solutions to lower the cost of housing,” Levine said.
For her part, Warren said on Boston Public Radio that the boldness of the bill lies in its willingness to take immediate concrete action rather than kicking the can of housing affordability down the road once again.
“It just moves us in the right direction,” Warren said. “It’s not going to be an overnight change. But it also is the federal government, for the first time in, like, pretty much forever, saying something besides, ‘Damn, [the] price of housing is going up.’ That’s what the federal government has been doing now for decades ... This was an effort to say, tell us different ways that we can be helpful.”
