On Monday, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill aimed at making it easier to build housing and bring down the cost of both buying and renting. The House is expected to pass it later this week, and President Donald Trump has said he supports it.Housing has become a huge issue in recent years. There isn’t enough of it, and what there is is unaffordable for a lot of people. That’s the case nowhere more than at the low end of the market.Home prices have jumped about 50% just in the last six years, and rents are up nearly 30% nationally. That’s made it especially hard for very low-income people to find a place to live, according to Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com.“That is the side of the market that has really dried up the most over the last decade,” she said.From November 2024: Here are five fixes for the U.S. housing shortageFrom June 2024: Given the housing shortage, why is it so hard to build new apartments?From June 2022: What to know about affordable housing — and where it’s all goneBetween 2014 and 2024, the number of apartments renting for less than $1,000 a month dropped by about a third, according to a new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.“It's a function of a lack of supply pushing up rents generally, and the fact that building new has gotten so bloody expensive,” said Chris Herbert, managing director at the Joint Center.The cost of land and construction is so high, that it doesn’t make financial sense to build low-cost housing, he said. “People at the low end of the spectrum are making compromises any way they can, but mostly what they're doing is spending more of their income on housing.”Most people who make less than $30,000 a year now spend more than half of what they make on rent and utilities.