Affordability has gone from being a dry financial term to an all-purpose hot button. Groceries, health care, child care, cars, gas — you name it, and affordability is attached to it these days. And then there’s housing, one of the stickiest issues in America’s affordability discussions. 

On March 12, the U.S. Senate passed a massive housing bill addressing affordability and supply, mostly of single-family homes. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, chock-full of more than 40 provisions, garnered rare — by today’s rancorous political standards — bipartisan support, tallying a 89-10 vote. The bill features a slew of financing, permitting, zoning and environmental reforms aimed at lowering housing costs and speeding up new home construction.  

The House passed an equally bipartisan, if pared-down version in February. The Senate bill, which adopted many of House provisions, now moves back to the lower chamber for consideration, where it’s facing an uphill battle, primarily over the contentious issue of whether large institutional investors should continue buying and renting homes, a practice decried by both progressive stalwart Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — a co-sponsor of the ROAD Act — and President Donald Trump, who issued an executive order in January calling for an end to the practice. 

Ironically, that so-called « build-to-rent » portion of the housing market is relatively small compared to another one — factory-built manufactured homes — which received a huge boost from the ROAD Act and is far more consequential toward the overarching goal of building more homes. 

The bill allows manufactured homes to be assembled without a permanent chassis, increases federal loan limits for buyers and relaxes zoning regulations on where they can be sited. Those changes go a long way toward removing the stigma hanging over low-priced « mobile homes. » 

« That is the challenge we’ve had, » said Dr. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, the industry’s trade association. « The stigma comes from what our houses look like and the elevations we’re able to offer. We will 1774801821 be allowed under our federal building code to build more housing types, » she said. « We were constrained for 50 years that every house we built had to be on a permanent chassis. » 

By allowing for removable chassis, the bill will enable manufactured homes builders to innovate designs, said Bill Boor, CEO of Cavco Industries, one of the industry’s largest companies, in an email statement. « While we’ll still make permanent-chassis homes, the ability to also make removable chassis homes will continue to break down zoning barriers and increase the supply of lower-cost, high-quality homes, » he wrote.

In anticipation of the legislative changes, Boor says Cavco has invested heavily in retooling its existing plants to increase capacity and change its production processes where possible. « Similarly, in the last two years, we have unified our branding under the Cavco name to expand recognition in the marketplace and segmented our extensive product offering, » he wrote.

Berkshire Hathaway-owned Clayton Homes is the biggest player in this market.

Taken together, the provisions have the potential to substantially increase housing supply and create low-cost options for achieving the American Dream of homeownership, an ideal that’s been slipping away. More than 70% of Americans are concerned about housing affordability, according to several polls. No wonder, considering that the national median price for a single-family home is roughly $400,000, in a real-estate market with a housing supply shortage of 4 million homes and while 30-year mortgage rates stubbornly remain above 6%. 

Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for Redfin, a national real estate brokerage firm, deems the manufactured housing provisions as the most important parts of the ROAD Act. « The incentives for zoning reform and [other] deregulations will matter in parts of the country that have severe housing shortages, » she said. « I’m most excited about building more [manufactured] housing in places where land values are very high, because there’s a lack of available land to build on, » she added. 

The National Association of Realtors has expressed its support for the Senate bill in a statement from its executive vice president and chief advocacy officer Shannon McGahn. « The bill gives communities new tools and resources to build more homes, streamlines federal processes that delay construction and updates financing options for manufactured and rural housing, » she said. 

It’s notable that both NAR and Redfin are enthused about the market for manufactured homes, historically not a huge focus for many real estate agents.

Fight over factory-built homes

Less sanguine about the bill’s expanded definition of manufactured housing is the Modular Home Builders Association, which represents companies in the other burgeoning segment of affordable, factory-built housing. Unlike manufactured homes, which follow a national HUD building code and often face firm zoning restrictions, modular homes are constructed to the same state, local or regional building codes as traditional site-built homes. That means more variable designs of modular homes.  

While the bill « makes broad political overtures about studying barriers to expanding modular construction, it simultaneously provides clear and tangible competitive advantages to the manufactured housing sector, » said Tom Hardiman, executive director of the MHBA. He warns that it may end up confusing home buyers, with the removal of the chassis requirement for manufactured homes to further « blur the lines for consumers who may mistakenly believe they are purchasing a modular home. » 

That notion doesn’t square with Gooch. « I don’t see how an entry-level home buyer who sees a brand-new home built with the federal seal of approval is going to feel like, ‘Oh, wait, I thought this was built to a different building code. I thought this was modular, not manufactured,' » she said. « To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. »

The bill also loosens rules around building increasingly popular accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — such as granny flats, in-law suites or backyard cottages — alongside existing structures. That creates more opportunities not only for manufactured homes but also modular homes. « If you talk to a [Redfin] agent, they will tell you that homes with ADUs are very popular, » Fairweather said. « Anything that makes ADUs easier to build, I think [agents] and their clients are going to like. » 

In the end, Hardiman says he is « cautiously optimistic » about the Senate bill and the opportunities it presents to expand factory-built housing across the U.S., despite his concerns about consumer confusion between manufactured and modular homes. « I would anticipate more of our members specializing in some of the project types included in the bill, specifically ADUs, » he said. 

Big investors and buy-to-rent controversy

Although enhancements to the factory-built housing industry are far more meaningful in terms of expanding the supply of affordable homes, the investor provisions are receiving outsized attention. Dating back to the Great Recession and the Covid pandemic, when private investment firms began pouring billions into purchasing single-family homes, the issue has become an equal-opportunity boogeyman. The ROAD Act calls for a ban on large institutional investors from buying new single-family homes if they already own at least 350 such dwellings.  

There is, however, a carveout that allows those investors to build new homes and rehabilitate existing ones, specifically for the rental market. But there’s a critical caveat, stipulating that those homes would have to be sold to individual buyers after seven years. Unlike Sen. Warren, President Trump appeased Wall Street, as well as home builders, by endorsing this concession for the BTR market, which has accelerated in recent years in communities across the country. The House-passed version does not include the investor provision in any form, and House members are now divided on whether to add it in.    

The BTR issue has drawn mixed reactions across the housing industry. While the Senate bill was still being debated, several industry groups — including the National Association of Home Builders, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the National Housing Conference — issued a position paper stating that « the seven-year disposition requirement will effectively shut down BTR development, leading to less supply and fewer options for renters. » According to a recent report by Redfin, 31% of rentals in the U.S. are single-family homes, the lowest share on record. 

The day the ROAD Act passed, NAHB chairman Bill Owens put out a statement quantifying the possible impact of the BTR ban, saying that it « could slash single-family production by nearly 40,000 units per year. » 

Yet, as often as institutional investors have been vilified for scooping up millions of homes, the data doesn’t back up the contention. Indeed, investors who own more than 100 properties make up less than 1% of the U.S. housing market, according to an August report from the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center. 

Nonetheless, at the margin, that’s a significant share, especially within the BTR market, said Edward Pinto, senior fellow and co-director of the AEI Housing Center. While BTR communities are a relatively new phenomenon, he said, those homes already account for 4% of total single-family rental stock, and they play an outsize role in some key, populous states across the country. 

« The capital being provided by these investors would not be able to be substituted by the building of single-family owned properties, » Pinto said. He cited AEI data showing that 72% of BTR developments are concentrated in just six states — Florida, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. « It turns out that it’s easier to build a [BTR] development in those six states than it is to build a single-family for-sale development. » 

A tough road ahead for a new American Dream

As the House now considers moving forward on a final housing bill, BTR critics are urging members to drop the restriction. Supporters, in turn, argue that increasing the home rental market will shatter the homeownership dream. According to recent surveys, though, that might be an outdated aspiration, especially among younger Americans. 

The Center for Generational Kinetics last year polled 1,000 participants, from ages 18 to 70, who currently live in a single-family rental home. Just 8% defined the American Dream as owning a home, and 70% said they felt relieved to not bear the burden of maintenance costs or taxes. Additionally, 53% of Gen Z respondents reported having better access to schools or jobs through renting, while Gen Xers were more likely to choose renting for convenience. 

In his just-released 2026 letter to investors, Larry Fink, CEO of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock (which has stressed during the current political moment that it is not among investors that buy homes), wondered about the value of homeownership. « Housing is not a guaranteed high-return investment, » he wrote. « Once you account for property taxes, insurance, maintenance and transaction costs — all of which have risen meaningfully in many places — long-term returns can be more modest and more uneven than headline price increases suggest. … If we want broader participation in economic growth, we cannot rely on a single asset, purchased later and later in life, to carry that burden alone. »

Per the NAR, the median age for first-time homebuyers in the U.S. is 40, a record high. 

The National Low Income Housing Coalition advocates on behalf of people with the lowest incomes, whose access to affordable, quality housing is especially challenging in today’s economy. The ROAD Act includes several provisions that the NLIHC had prioritized in discussions with Congressional lawmakers, said Kim Johnson, senior director of public policy. 

A particularly important one, Johnson said, would help preserve affordable rental and homeownership opportunities for low-income people in rural areas, cut red tape and encourage public-private partnerships to increase investment in the rural housing supply. « It would essentially be a voucher, » she said, « and people living in those homes would be able to stay there even if the affordability provisions expire. That would impact about 400,000 low-income rural residents. » 

Most of the NLIHC’s priorities were not in the House bill. « Ideally we’d like to see a [combined] bill passed that includes all of them, » Johnson said.  

That echoes other groups’ calls for a speedy agreement on a compromise bill that could pass muster with President Trump. But it’s shaping up to be a tough process. Some House Republicans, in exchange for approving the Senate bill, insist on including several community bank deregulatory bills in pending cryptocurrency legislation. Leaders in both chambers have suggested that the Senate bill is likely to go to a bicameral conference to reconcile their differences. 

And that’s not the only monkey wrench in the works. As much as the president has promoted federal action on affordable housing — including the institutional investor ban — Trump has vowed to withhold his signature from any bill that reaches his desk until Congress passes the controversial voter ID measure dubbed the SAVE America Act, which is being hotly debated in the Senate.

« It supersedes everything else, » Trump said. 

Looming over all things politics, though, are November’s midterm elections. The risk of not approving some form of housing affordability legislation may outweigh Trump’s intransigence on the SAVE Act. « It comes down to, It’s the election, stupid, » Pinto said, paraphrasing the axiom regarding voters’ perennial focus on the economy. « The election’s coming up and both sides want to be seen as having passed something. »