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| 7 Jul 2026 | |
| Blogs |
By Avery Freeman, Policy and Research Analyst, Data Foundation, Center for Data Policy
Congress passed a large, comprehensive housing bill in June 2026. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R. 6644) cleared the House 358 to 32 and the Senate 85 to 5, a significant bipartisan agreement in Congress. The bill is meant to make housing easier to build and more affordable, at a time when estimates put the country’s housing shortfall somewhere between 3.8 million and 7 million homes, with the median home price around $400,000.
Much of the coverage so far has focused on the political back-and-forth over the bill’s signing. However, a bill that passes both chambers becomes law automatically if the President neither signs nor vetoes it within ten days (excluding Sundays) while Congress is in session, so the housing bill may still take effect once Congress returns to session. The bill was presented to the President on June 29, 2026, for signature.
Some of the difficulty in addressing the housing shortage has come from a lack of consistent information on basic questions: which local governments own vacant land, which cities allow more housing to be built, how quickly housing is actually getting built at the local level, and who owns the single-family homes in the market. Without that information, it is harder for federal government officials to hold local governments accountable, direct resources toward what is working effectively, or identify where the problems are. Several provisions in this bill aim to close some of those information gaps.
One of the most direct data provisions in the bill requires any community that receives federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding to develop and maintain a public, searchable online database of every vacant parcel of land the government owns. That requirement starts on October 1, 2026. In practice, this means that if your city or county owns land that is sitting empty, there should eventually be a public way to look that up. That kind of information is not always easy to find today, even for city planners. Making it public could help identify sites where new housing might be built, since government-owned vacant land is often a relatively straightforward place to start.
The bill also creates a system, often referred to as the Build Now framework, that ties a portion of CDBG funding to housing production data. Communities must report housing unit counts at the block level, and HUD is only required to notify grantees annually about their funding eligibility based on that data. One notable design choice is how growth is measured. The idea is to reward improvement, not just absolute volume, so a small town that goes from 10 units a year to 20 is treated the same as a large city that goes from 1,000 to 2,000. This matters because it means federal funding may increasingly follow places that can document, with data, that they are building more housing. Communities that do not track or report this consistently could lose out on funding. This is one example of the federal government treating data collection and reporting as a meaningful condition for continued grant funding.
Local zoning rules are often cited by researchers as one factor in the housing shortage, but there has not been a consistent national picture of what those rules look like from city to city. Under the bill, CDBG recipients will report on 22 specific zoning categories, including parking minimums, rules for accessory dwelling units, whether multifamily housing is allowed by right, height limits, minimum lot sizes, and permitting timelines. HUD is also directed to publish best practice frameworks that communities can be compared against. This is relevant to the general public because it turns local zoning, which has traditionally varied widely and been difficult to compare across cities, into something researchers, journalists, and residents can line up city by city. Over time, this ability to compare could make it easier to see how a given city’s zoning policies compare with others.
One provision establishes a pilot program to install temperature sensors in public housing units and other federally assisted rental housing to help verify whether units meet basic heating and cooling standards. Tenants in substandard housing sometimes deal with extreme indoor temperatures that are difficult to prove after the fact, which can leave disputes as a matter of one person’s word against another’s. A sensor creates a timestamped record, which could make it easier to substantiate and document habitability complaints.
The bill also launches a pilot program at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) for mortgages under $100,000, which banks have historically avoided because they are not very profitable to originate. Starting no later than a year after the pilot launches, the FHA will send Congress an annual report evaluating the pilot's performance.
The bill bars large institutional investors that already own 350 or more single-family homes from purchasing additional ones. This has been a priority for the White House, following an executive order directing the Federal Trade Commission to examine anti-competitive activity in housing markets. Institutional ownership has grown noticeably in some markets. In Jacksonville, Florida, investors own more than one in five single-family rental homes. Between 2018 and 2024, Dallas and Phoenix each added at least 16,000 investor-owned homes, increases of 177 percent and 114 percent, respectively. This provision also points to a data gap. A 350-home cap depends on reliably tracking who owns what. There is currently no national registry of single-family homeownership by investors, so the bill establishes the rule without fully building the infrastructure needed to enforce it. That is a gap worth watching as implementation moves forward.
A pattern runs through several parts of this bill: block-level housing counts, zoning self-reporting across 22 categories, and growth data tied to grant funding. One underlying idea is that part of the housing shortage has been made harder to address by a lack of clear, standardized, public information about what governments own, what they permit, how quickly housing gets built, and who is purchasing available supply. This bill takes steps toward that kind of infrastructure, even though it is not framed as a data bill. That said, data requirements only work as well as the agencies implementing them are resourced to carry out. HUD has faced budget pressure and staffing constraints in recent years, so an open question is whether these new reporting requirements will be adequately supported or only partially fulfilled.
If these data provisions are implemented as written, it may eventually be possible to look up whether a city owns vacant land, whether its zoning rules have become more or less restrictive over time, and whether public housing meets basic habitability standards. That is roughly the argument underlying part of the bill: it is difficult to address a problem without reliable ways to measure it, and housing policy in the United States has often lacked such measurement.
