President Trump has cancelled a signing planned for today of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the largest housing affordability in decades passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Members of Congress were set to take a victory lap after passing the largest affordable housing bill in decades. It was a rare bipartisan accomplishment, but President Trump upended that, canceling a signing planned for today. He says he won’t sign the housing bill unless Congress passes a strict voter ID law that has hit a dead end in the Senate. NPR senior political correspondent Tamara Keith and personal finance reporter Stephan Bisaha are here to break it down for us. Hi there.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hello.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: Stephan, I want to start with you. Just first tell us about this housing bill.
BISAHA: Well, this is a big bill with a lot packed inside, but the main idea here is to make housing more affordable. If you look at just the median sales price for a home in the U.S., it is more than $400,000. That is just far out of the price range for what most Americans can afford. And as lawmakers told me, this is an issue in rural areas, cities, East Coast, West Coast – really all over the country – which is why so many lawmakers from both parties were behind this bill.
KEITH: And affordability is the theme of this year’s midterm elections. It’s the issue voters keep telling us that they care about most. And earlier this year, when President Trump was taking flack for not doing enough to bring down the cost of living, he actually made housing a key pillar of his affordability plan. In his State of the Union address, he told the story of a mom from Houston who put bids on 20 homes and lost out every time to private equity firms paying cash. He called for a ban on large Wall Street investment firms buying up homes by the thousands.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And now I’m asking Congress to make that ban permanent because homes for people – really, that’s what we want. We want homes for people, not for corporations. Corporations are doing just fine.
SUMMERS: OK. So back to the bill. How does this bill try to address affordability?
BISAHA: So one of the main things is just what you heard Trump call for – a ban on private equity groups buying up large numbers of homes. The bill would cap them at buying no more than 350 single-family homes. The bill also tries to make homes more affordable by boosting how many are available – more homes, cheaper prices – basic supply and demand. And so the bill tries to encourage more building by streamlining federal regulations. It also nudges local governments to speed up the home building process by giving more federal dollars to places that build more.
SUMMERS: These changes – would they actually help make housing more affordable?
BISAHA: Not right away. Congress can’t just order up millions of new homes to be built. They can make it easier, though, for builders to start doing that. But even if they do, it’ll take a while for those homes to hit the market. So don’t expect fast results, and don’t expect this bill alone to suddenly make the American dream of home ownership attainable for most people.
KEITH: But in this age where Congress is doing very little and almost none of it is bipartisan, it is notable that this had such broad bipartisan support. And even if it is a little bit incremental, when it comes to showing the American people that they are doing something, anything, about an issue that a lot of people care about, this bill is that answer. Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York was on Morning Edition today to talk about it.
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MIKE LAWLER: You have to be able to work together, and I think the federal government hadn’t really addressed the issue of housing in decades, and this was a big opportunity to do that.
KEITH: Now, what’s notable about Lawler is he is considered one of the most endangered Republicans in this year’s midterms. He’s a moderate Republican in a district that leans Democratic, and this bill is one of those kitchen table issues that Republicans are desperate to be able to campaign on this fall.
SUMMERS: OK. And that gets us to President Trump and his big surprise, his announcement that he was not going to sign this housing bill today after all. Tam, what happened?
KEITH: Yeah. The stage was set for a big bill signing today at the Capitol. Like, literally, there was a stage set up and a table with the presidential seal, and then Trump posted that he was canceling the bill signing until such time as Congress passes an unrelated bill called the SAVE America Act. That would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would put limitations on voting by mail. But Republican senators keep telling him, it doesn’t have the votes to pass. In a separate post, he described the bipartisan Housing bill as Warren-centric (ph) and said it was of minor importance compared to lowering interest rates and passing the SAVE America Act.
SUMMERS: And by Warren-centric there, I assume he is meaning Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. But as Tam was mentioning, Stephan, this bill had bipartisan support and a lot of bipartisan support.
BISAHA: Yeah. It is bipartisan. This bill got overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats. Only a few lawmakers voted against it. And this isn’t just about the votes making it bipartisan. This bill has more than 40 different parts in it that were written by different Republicans and Democrats. So it is a collection of all their ideas. And, you know, Republican Senator Tim Scott was just as instrumental as Warren in making this bill happen, not to mention Republican Congressman French Hill. After this bill passed, I thought the fight was really going to be over who gets credit for it. And here’s Trump essentially handing that credit over to Democrats. I did catch Senator Warren on the phone and asked her about Trump labeling this as her bill.
ELIZABETH WARREN: He wants to blame Democrats and blame me for busting our tails to try to lower costs for American families. Well, bring on the blame.
BISAHA: She also said she is grateful – Republicans who worked hard on this bill, but it’s about actually delivering.
SUMMERS: And Tam, I do have to ask you about the politics here. What does this blowup mean for the upcoming midterm elections?
KEITH: Well, first, I should just say that Trump has made big pronouncements like this before, only to quietly back down. But just in the past couple of weeks, he has repeatedly stepped on Republican messaging or sabotaged plans for Senate votes, and that’s a pretty remarkable problem to have when Republicans have a governing trifecta – they control the House and the Senate and the White House – and are trying to make the case to the American people that they should be allowed to hang on to that power. And what do they have to show for it? It’s self-defeating in the case of this housing bill, grabbing a loss from the jaws…
SUMMERS: Yeah.
KEITH: …Of victory. This morning, a top Trump political adviser who is helping to lead midterm strategy for Republicans was on X crowing about the bill. Quote, “this was a signature commitment that President Trump laid out in his State of the Union. Just a few months later, it becomes law.” Except now that isn’t so clear. He did not respond to my text asking what happened.
SUMMERS: NPR’s Tamara Keith and Stephan Bisaha, thanks to both of you.
KEITH: You’re welcome.
BISAHA: Thank you.
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