“Halleluiah”
Senator Tim Scott gets a bipartisan win on housing supply
Anyone susceptible to being discouraged by the polarization, bitterness, and scorched-earth partisan vindictiveness of Washington can be cheered up by Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.
Senator Scott is chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. That Committee today unanimously approved the Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act of 2025. Scott says the legislation “takes important steps to increase access to affordable housing for Americans across the country by expanding and preserving housing supply, improving housing affordability, and increasing oversight and efficiency of federal regulators and housing programs.”
One can quibble with one provision or another of the legislation. Many people doubtless will. Virtually every new federal law comes with unpredicted costs and unforeseen consequences. But compromises are needed to build legislative consensus, and some of the items in the bill are promising. For example, there’s a requirement for the department of Housing and Urban Development to conduct a study on work requirements for public housing residents, “with an assessment of the challenges and benefits of work requirements on public housing agencies and families, including the effects on homelessness, poverty, asset building, job attainment, and public housing agency administrative capacity.” And there are efforts to expand the private housing supply by making modular and prefabricated housing units more readily eligible for loans. Other provisions reduce regulatory barriers to building and create incentives that reward communities that are building more housing supply.
There’s a policy story here, that there is a workable sweet spot on housing affordability large enough to encompass both the “abundance” and Yes-in-My-Backyard or “abundance” types on the center-left (Ezra Klein, Derek ThompsonMatthew Yglesias, et al) and the pro-development, deregulation, oppose-zero-growth-environmental-extremism types on the center-right.
And there’s also a political story here, which is that Senator Tim Scott is someone unusually special. He talked about growing up poor and living in a rental unit with his grandparents, sharing a bedroom and a bed with his mother and his brother. “Many people around the country are frustrated with the way we do American politics wonder, is there any issue that brings this nation together and I’m here to say, halleluiah! We have found one — it is housing. And halleluiah is a southern term, but it’s a term of endearment,” Scott said. I always thought hallelujah was a Hebrew term, for praising God, but whether southern or Hebrew, the expression, and the sentiment, is accurately applied.
There’s a saying that in Washington bipartisanship is the term for the Republicans surrendering and voting for what the Democrats want, but that does not appear to be the case here. The legislation, while falling considerably short of any libertarian free-market fantasy, does nonetheless move in the direction of a supply-side housing solution.
And Scott’s being modest. The cooperation doesn’t end with housing. It extends to other issues where Senator Scott is involved.
Earlier this month Scott joined Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, to introduce the Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act. That has already attracted other Democrats (Tina Smith, Sheldon Whitehouse, Cory Booker) and Republicans (James Risch, Marsha Blackburn, Thomas Tillis) as cosponsors. That will help make it possible for patients to receive hospital-like care in their homes, saving money and making patients more comfortable, as research by Dr. David Levine of Mass General Brigham suggests.
A housing bill getting unanimously voted out of a Senate Committee or a home-hospital bill getting introduced with bipartisan support gets much less attention than the Russiagate scandal or the Jeffrey Epstein files or whatever other story the press can seize on at the moment to symbolize Washington dysfunction or corruption. Even on the housing affordability front, the mostly common-sense measures Scott and his Senate colleagues are advancing attract much less coverage than Israel-hating socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents in New York. Conflict and extremism get more clicks than cooperation. Neither the housing bill nor the hospital bill have yet been become law. But when a senator like Tim Scott says halleluiah, it’s infectious. He managed to bring along Senator Elizabeth Warren, even.
Plenty of well intentioned and patriotic wealthy people, from Elon Musk to the backers of Joe Lieberman’s “No Labels” to the Forward Party, think a new political party is needed to get past the polarization and to advance common-sense solutions. Senator Scott and his colleagues are showing that it’s possible even within the existing two-party framework.
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I spent 30 years in the affordable housing business. Government involvement is a mess which leads to ridiculously expensive production of “affordable housing”. At the margin, there are some things in this bill that might help increase the supply of affordable housing. However, the bill appears to be as likely to materially increase the supply of affordable housing as the Biden era “infrastructure” bill materially increased the supply and quality of our infrastructure…