On June 23, 2026, Congress passed H.R. 6644, known as the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which The Guardian newspaper called “the biggest change to federal policy for buyers, renters and homebuilders in decades.” The Senate passed the bill 85-5, and the House passed it 358-32.
It’s supporters say H.R. 6644 reduces unnecessary regulatory barriers to new home construction, modernizes HUD programs, enables community banks to more freely deploy funding, includes community banking bills to provide needed relief to America’s main streets, expands local lending for housing construction and mortgages, and provides more than 45 provisions to reduce unnecessary regulatory barriers to new home construction.
President Donald Trump refused to sign this housing bill, but since he did not veto it, it became law without his signature. Trump pressured Congress to pass first the Save America Act, an unrelated bill which would impose a long list of new restrictions on state election officials and voters before the November midterm elections. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), commented: “Trump refused to sign it, but he couldn’t stop it. This law is groundbreaking. It will build more housing, bring down costs, and for the first time, stop private equity from buying up homes.”
The president called H.R. 6644 a “big yawn.” But the new law contains a major provision that Trump promoted in his State of the Union Speech last January: the impact of large institutional investors on housing affordability. “I signed an executive order,” Trump said in January, “to ban large Wall Street investment firms who are buying up in the thousands single-family homes. And now I’m asking Congress to make that ban permanent, because homes for people — really that’s what we want — we want homes for people, not for corporations.”
The White House Executive Order, Stopping Wall Street From Competing With Main Street Homebuyers, stated that “Buying and owning a home has long been considered the pinnacle of the American dream, and a way for families to invest and build lifetime wealth… that American dream has been increasingly out of reach for too many of our citizens, especially first-time homebuyers… A growing share of single-family homes… have been purchased by large Wall Street investors, crowding out families seeking to buy homes… Hardworking young families cannot effectively compete for starter homes with Wall Street firms and their vast resources. Neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests. People live in homes, not corporations.”
Title 10 of H.R. 6644 is entitled Home-Ownership for Main Street America. Section 1001 of that title, Homes Are For People, Not Corporations, states that “No large institutional investor may purchase, or enter into a contract to directly or indirectly purchase, any single-family home.” A large institutional investor is defined as “an investment fund, corporation, general or limited partnership, limited liability company, joint venture, association, or other for-profit entity that is a legal entity… engaged, in whole or in part, in the business of investing in, owning, renting, managing, or holding single-family homes.” If a large institutional investor “directly or indirectly has investment control of… 350 [or more] single family homes in the aggregate,” it cannot purchase a single-family home, “or directly or indirectly control the general partner or managing member of the entity that owns the single-family home.”
House Committee on Financial Services Chairman French Hill (R-AR), who introduced the bipartisan bill, noted: “For over two years, I have worked to give more Americans greater choice and affordability on the path to homeownership… I have fought to increase the supply of housing, cut red tape, increase capital, and make local rules and zoning more competitive. We have achieved that by strengthening community banks, preventing institutional investors from outcompeting American families for homes, and modernizing building codes.”
It remains to be seen if expanding the role of the federal government in the production of housing will “cut red tape.” At the state and local level we are witnessing an anti-single-family bias, with emphasis on smaller, crowded lots, accessory dwelling units, and multi-family housing. H. R. 6644 adds new layers of federal bureaucracy which may irk local housing officials, such as:
- Best practice frameworks for state and local zoning and land-use policies.
- Requiring Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) recipients to publish an online database of undeveloped land they own.
- Offering CDBG funding bonuses for accelerated home building and funding reductions for lagging building.
Considering that institutional investors bought 27% of U.S. homes for sale in the first quarter of 2025, according to BatchData, tamping down such investors may bring some much-needed relief to aspiring homebuyers.
Al Norman’s Pushback column is published by the Recorder on the first and third Wednesday of every month.