This spring, we reluctantly decided to oppose Senate legislation intended to make housing more affordable, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. While the legislation included some small reforms that could have reduced the cost of housing, it also added new regulations that would have made housing more expensive, not less. But, pleasingly, the House has released its own bipartisan version of the legislation this week, and it fixes the problems the Senate bill created. This is legislation we can support. The Senate, and the White House, would be wise to adopt it.Housing affordability is arguably the most pressing public policy issue today. The median age of first-time homebuyers reached a record high of 40 in 2025, compared with just 29 in 1980. Only 1 in 5 homebuyers were first-time purchasers in 2025, down from around 2 in 5 in 2007.
Young adults’ inability to afford a home is one of the leading drivers of the United States’s declining birthrate, which reached a record low this year. If we fail to solve the housing affordability problem, the decline will continue.
The cause of high home prices is no mystery; not enough new homes are being built. The U.S. is between 3 million and 8 million homes short of what is needed for a normal and affordable housing market. The shortage is not a market failure but a policy failure. Federal and state governments have imposed a multitude of unnecessary restrictions and regulations on new home construction, driving up costs and making too many new projects unprofitable.
