An End-of-Year Check-In on Congressional Housing Action

A blog empowering Hispanic homeownership through advocacy and policy.

By Elizabeth Nimmons
December 18, 2025

As Congress closes out the year, housing remains one of the few areas with genuine bipartisan interests. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the most procedurally stalled. Over the past several weeks, lawmakers in both chambers have released or advanced major housing packages, signaling a shared recognition that housing affordability and supply constraints are weighing heavily on households and the broader economy. At the same time, disagreements between the House and Senate over how to move forward have left much of that momentum unresolved as lawmakers look ahead to next year. Here’s a quick lay of the land:

Major Housing Bills That Did Not Make the Final Cut

In the Senate, lawmakers advanced the ROAD to Housing Act, a sweeping bipartisan package designed to address housing supply constraints, modernize federal housing programs, and reduce barriers to development. The bill was widely described as a landmark effort and represented months of bipartisan negotiations within the Senate Banking Committee.

In the House, Representatives Emanuel Cleaver and Mike Flood introduced the HOME Reform Act, legislation aimed at modernizing the HOME Investment Partnerships Program by increasing flexibility, improving program efficiency, and better aligning federal dollars with local housing needs.

Despite strong bipartisan interest, neither bill was ultimately included in the final National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a must-pass legislative vehicle that many housing advocates viewed as a potential pathway to enactment. Their exclusion underscores a recurring challenge in housing policy: broad agreement on the problem, but limited consensus on the legislative process.

The House Financial Services Committee Moves Forward

While those efforts stalled in the NDAA, the House Financial Services Committee released a new bipartisan housing package, titled the Housing for the 21st Century Act, earlier this month. The package combines several bills previously introduced on a bipartisan basis and reflects committee leadership’s intent to keep housing at the forefront heading into next year.

The House package focuses largely on:

• Expanding housing supply,
• Modernizing housing finance and federal programs, and
• Reducing regulatory and administrative barriers that slow development.
• Its release signals that House leadership does not intend to abandon housing reform — even as differences with the Senate remain unresolved.

Bipartisan Agreement, Procedural Disagreement

Importantly, leaders in both parties in the House and Senate continue to publicly state that advancing housing legislation is a priority. That alignment is meaningful in an otherwise polarized Congress.

Where lawmakers diverge is on strategy: Senate leaders have pushed for comprehensive, bipartisan packages that move together, while House leaders have favored advancing committee-driven legislation and narrower packages, often separate from Senate efforts. As a result, housing legislation is advancing on parallel tracks, rather than through a unified, bicameral strategy, which makes near-term enactment more complicated.

What This Means As We Head Into 2026

As Congress looks ahead, several things are clear:

• Housing is not going away as a policy priority: The volume of bipartisan bills and committee activity reflects sustained attention to affordability and supply challenges.
• Progress is likely to be incremental: Rather than one sweeping bill, housing reforms may advance through multiple vehicles, negotiations, and partial wins.
• Advocacy still matters: With bipartisan interest in both chambers, stakeholder engagement will shape which provisions ultimately move — and which are left behind.

For NAHREP and its members, this moment presents continued opportunity. The national housing policy conversation is active, but the outcome will depend on whether lawmakers can bridge procedural divides and translate shared concern into durable policy solutions that expand housing supply, improve access to credit, and support sustainable homeownership.