The bill is set to become law automatically just after midnight Saturday, thanks to a quirk of the Constitution rather than a presidential signature. President Trump had pledged not to sign the housing measure until Congress first passed a national voter identification proposal — legislation that has stalled in the Senate. With that impasse continuing and Trump reiterating his refusal to sign as recently as last week, the housing bill will take effect without his approval, simply by running out the ten-day clock the Constitution allows for presidential action.

Despite the anticlimactic path to passage, housing advocates say the substance of the bill is anything but minor. Rather than one bold stroke, the legislation bundles together 56 separate provisions — regulatory tweaks, pilot programs, low-cost loans and grants — aimed at chipping away at the nation’s housing affordability crisis from multiple angles. No single piece is likely to transform the market on its own. Supporters are betting that, together, they might.

“We don’t often get together to celebrate federal housing legislation,” Stephen Russell, president of the Housing Federation of San Diego, said at a press conference last week. “I think the last time Congress passed something of this magnitude, a lot of you weren’t even born yet… this is close to a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

The bill’s momentum reflects a growing bloc of lawmakers aligned with the “Yes In My Backyard” movement, many of them from California, a state that knows a thing or two about sky-high housing costs. But the push to link affordability to housing supply has become a bipartisan cause nationally. Tellingly, the legislation was born out of a partnership between Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the Senate’s most progressive members.

Though none of the bill’s provisions target California specifically, several stand out for the mark they could leave on the state.

BUILD NOW, OR ELSE

For expensive cities that have chronically underbuilt — a description that fits much of urban California — the bill pairs incentives with real consequences.

The legislation reworks the Community Development Block Grant program, one of the federal government’s primary funding streams for affordable housing and local economic development. Cities with high housing costs, measured through price and vacancy data, that have a history of sluggish construction and continue to build below-average levels of housing will see their block grant funding cut by 10 percent. Those savings will be redirected to cities building at a faster clip.

That could carry “real implications for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which have traditionally lagged” in expanding housing supply, said David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

According to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data, the city of Los Angeles received $48.4 million in its most recent block grant allocation in 2024. San Francisco received $18.9 million. Those figures alone wouldn’t make or break either city’s budget.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, in an email. “Which, applied nationally, could have a big impact! Small nudges add up.”

Beyond the dollar amounts, the precedent may matter more. Even in California, where the state has aggressively pushed cities to plan for more housing and penalized those that don’t, lawmakers have never before punished municipalities for failing to actually build — an outcome not always within a city’s control.

Garcia called the idea “inconceivable in past Congresses.” Even so, the provision hasn’t drawn much public pushback from local government groups. In an online summary, National League of Cities lobbyist Michael Wallace praised the broader housing bill as an example of the federal government “choosing collaboration with local governments over the imposition of laws,” highlighting other provisions that give cities more flexibility in spending block grant funds and new incentive programs to boost supply.

LOSING THE CHASSIS

Manufactured homes are often casually called “mobile homes,” but in practice, they rarely move. Built on assembly lines and trucked to their final destination, these naturally affordable homes — the type policymakers across California and the country say the market desperately needs more of — are typically installed on permanent foundations. Fewer than 10 percent are ever relocated again.

Yet the federal building code governing manufactured homes still requires a costly holdover from their mobile origins: a permanent steel chassis.

That chassis — a massive steel undercarriage complete with removable axles and wheels — is technically there to make transport easier. In practice, it functions as a bulky, 10-to-12-inch-thick floor that can’t be removed once the home is delivered. It adds thousands of dollars to the cost of each unit and makes it far more difficult to stack manufactured homes into two-story buildings or multifamily apartment complexes, according to Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute.

The new federal law eliminates the permanent chassis requirement — a change manufacturers and housing policy experts have pushed for since the mid-1980s.

“That relatively small change will expand access to one of the most affordable paths to homeownership,” said Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, at last week’s press conference.

Maxcy said she doesn’t expect the rule change to spark an overnight boom in manufactured housing. But especially in California, where high land costs make it more likely that new single-family homes will be built stacked on small lots, the change “gives us more opportunities and helps us bring the price down.”

DISASTER RECOVERY, MADE PERMANENT

In the months after a natural disaster, long after emergency federal funds run dry, Congress has historically stepped in with long-term rebuilding grants through the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program. Over the past three decades, the program has funneled more than $100 billion into long-term recovery work — building housing, repairing infrastructure, and helping with rental and relocation assistance. The money is typically reserved for low-income residents and communities “that won’t be able to recover without these funds,” said Marion McFadden, who ran the program under the Biden administration and now works at IEM, a disaster preparedness and recovery consulting firm.

Unfortunately for California, the program has never had a permanent, guaranteed existence. Since the mid-1990s, it’s been authorized and funded on an ad hoc basis, tucked into individual spending bills. That makes it difficult for communities trying to plan long-term recovery, and it means the rules governing the money — who gets it, when, under what conditions and for what purposes — get rewritten with every new administration, often slowing the process considerably. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Los Angeles has yet to receive any disaster recovery block grant funding following the 2025 wildfires. Congress has not yet appropriated any.

The new housing bill would permanently authorize the program in law for at least three years.

“This allows HUD to have funds ready before a disaster and make a decision within 15 days on whether it will provide funding,” McFadden said.

What the bill doesn’t do: provide additional funding. Disaster-prone communities will still have to wait for Congress to address that separately.

CLEARING A BOTTLENECK

For the past two decades, public housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have relied on the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program to repair and modernize their aging public housing stock. The program works by diversifying funding sources, giving local agencies more flexibility to secure loans and attract private investment.

Until just after midnight on July 11, the federal government was only authorized to approve 455,000 of these conversions nationwide. The new bill raises that cap by another 100,000 units.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years, and that bottleneck has just been removed,” Russell said.

Not every affordable housing advocate is celebrating. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has consistently opposed expanding the program, arguing that shifting funding sources could weaken existing tenant protections. It’s unclear how much truth there is to that concern — a study last year found no evidence that conversions under the program lead to increased evictions.

KEEPING WALL STREET OUT OF THE SUBURBS

If there’s one thing most people have heard about this bill, it’s that it bars “large institutional investors” from buying up more single-family homes.

The final version includes some significant caveats. The bill defines “large” as any corporate entity controlling more than 350 single-family homes. It’s not retroactive, so investors who already hold large portfolios don’t have to sell them off. There are exemptions for new construction, renovations and senior housing. In California specifically, where corporations and other large investors don’t play an outsized role in the housing market, the impact is likely to be modest.

The provision “takes an issue that resonates deeply with people across the country and applies a fairly modest fix,” said Chad Maisel, a fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and a former housing policy adviser to President Biden.

Still, the measure enjoys broad bipartisan support. Earlier this year, Trump called for even tougher restrictions on so-called corporate landlords. Gov. Gavin Newsom made a similar call that same week.

The anti-investor language in the final bill was softened considerably from an earlier version that threatened to undercut “build-to-rent” developments — well-financed subdivisions of single-family homes built specifically for renters. That earlier draft sparked backlash from developers and YIMBY advocates who otherwise strongly supported the bill, arguing that such communities are among the fastest-growing sources of new housing in the country and offer renters rare access to suburban-style, single-family living.

After that provision was stripped from the federal bill, state Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Fremont, now a congressional candidate, introduced state legislation reviving the idea. Her bill, SB 880, would have barred the bulk sale of multiple single-family homes, striking directly at the build-to-rent business model. That measure was rejected by the Assembly Judiciary Committee in late June.

Original source: CalMatters

The post What California’s “Once-in-a-Lifetime” Federal Housing Bill Would Mean for the State appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The bill didn’t arrive with the fanfare typically reserved for major legislation. It became law just after midnight without a signing ceremony, after President Trump declined to formally sign or veto it. The White House had actually scrapped a planned bill-signing last month amid a dispute over an unrelated voter ID measure stalled in the Senate. But under constitutional rules, a bill that sits unsigned for 10 days automatically becomes law — and that’s exactly what happened.

Despite the anticlimactic rollout, supporters describe the measure as historic: a rare bipartisan effort, born from a partnership between Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, aimed at chipping away at the nation’s housing shortage through dozens of smaller policy changes rather than one sweeping fix.

“We don’t often gather to celebrate federal housing legislation,” said Stephen Russell, president of the San Diego Housing Federation, at a press conference last week. “The last time Congress passed anything of this magnitude, many of you weren’t even alive. It’s almost a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

The law contains 56 separate provisions — regulatory adjustments, pilot programs, new loan products and grant incentives. None of them, on their own, is expected to solve California’s housing affordability crisis. But taken together, backers argue they could meaningfully shift the trajectory for cities that have struggled for years to build enough homes.

A carrot-and-stick approach for slow-growth cities

One of the more consequential changes targets the Community Development Block Grant program, a major federal funding stream for affordable housing and local development projects. Under the new law, expensive cities that consistently underbuild housing — based on measures like median home prices and vacancy rates — could see their grant funding cut by 10 percent. Those dollars would then be redirected to nearby cities that are building housing at a faster pace.

Housing policy experts say the change could have real consequences for cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of which have long lagged behind housing production goals. Los Angeles received roughly $48.4 million through the block grant program in 2024; San Francisco received about $18.9 million.

“I think this will be a small nudge,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action. “Which, taken across the country, could still have a good impact. Little nudges add up.”

More significant than the dollar amounts, experts say, is the precedent being set. Even California, which has aggressively pushed cities to plan for new housing, has never directly penalized municipalities for failing to actually build it — an outcome that isn’t always within a city’s control. David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, called the idea “inconceivable in previous congresses.”

Still, local government advocates haven’t pushed back hard against the change. The National League of Cities praised the broader law, noting it also includes new flexibility for how block grant dollars can be spent and new support for local planning efforts.

Easing rules for manufactured housing

The law also eliminates a long-standing federal building requirement that manufactured homes — often called mobile homes, even though most never move after being installed — be built on a permanent steel chassis.

Originally intended to make the homes easier to transport, the chassis in practice adds a bulky, expensive layer beneath the floor that serves little purpose once a home is placed on a permanent foundation. Removing the requirement, something industry advocates have sought since the 1980s, is expected to lower costs and make it easier to build multi-story manufactured homes or stack units into apartment-style buildings.

“That relatively minor change will expand access to one of the most affordable forms of home ownership available,” said Rep. Scott Peters, a San Diego Democrat.

Jess Maxcy, president of the California Manufactured Housing Institute, said the shift won’t spark an immediate building boom, but in a state where land costs push builders toward denser development, it “provides more opportunities and helps us reduce the price.”

More certainty for disaster recovery funding

For communities recovering from wildfires and other disasters, the law formally establishes — for at least three years — the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery program, which has funneled more than $100 billion nationally into long-term rebuilding efforts like housing construction and infrastructure repair.

Until now, the program operated on an ad hoc basis, requiring separate congressional funding after each disaster — a process that has left communities like Los Angeles, still recovering from the 2025 firestorms, without any allocated funds so far. The new law won’t immediately send fresh dollars to fire-affected areas, but it does create a framework allowing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to have funding ready in advance and make decisions within 15 days of a disaster.

“It creates the ability for HUD to have money on hand before a disaster and then make a decision within 15 days about whether they’re going to provide funding,” said Marion McFadden, a former HUD official who ran the program under President Biden.

Removing a cap on public housing conversions

The law also lifts a longstanding cap on the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which allows public housing authorities — including those in Los Angeles and the Bay Area — to tap private financing to renovate aging public housing stock. The previous 455,000-unit cap will rise by another 100,000 units.

“This has been a bottleneck in California for years, and that bottleneck just got removed,” Russell said.

Not everyone is celebrating the expansion. The National Low Income Housing Coalition has raised concerns that shifting funding sources could weaken tenant protections, though a recent study found no clear evidence that such conversions lead to increased evictions.

A modest curb on corporate homebuying

Perhaps the most talked-about provision bars “large institutional investors” — defined as entities controlling more than 350 single-family homes — from purchasing additional houses. The rule doesn’t apply retroactively, exempts new construction, renovations and senior housing, and is unlikely to have much impact in California, where large investors play a relatively small role in the housing market compared with other states.

Chad Maisel, a fellow at the Center for American Progress and former housing adviser to President Biden, described the provision as “a pretty modest intervention” to a politically popular issue. Still, it drew support from across the spectrum — Trump called for even tougher restrictions on corporate landlords earlier this year, and Gov. Gavin Newsom voiced similar concerns days later.

An earlier, tougher version of the provision had threatened to disrupt “build-to-rent” developments — planned communities of single-family rental homes — prompting pushback from developers and pro-housing advocates who argued such projects help address a shortage of family-sized rental housing. That language was ultimately removed from the federal bill.

In California, state Sen. Aisha Wahab of Fremont, now a congressional candidate, introduced a related bill, SB 880, that would have banned bulk sales of single-family homes to investors — striking directly at the build-to-rent business model. That legislation died in the Assembly Judiciary Committee in late June.

Original source: CalMatters

The post What California’s “Once-in-a-Lifetime” Federal Housing Bill Would Mean for Residents appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.