This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
Before the Memorial Day recess, the U.S. House passed a housing reform package — again.
“I think this is a meaningful step forward in making it easier to build homes, increasing the inventory and supply of housing and lowering the cost for hardworking families,” said GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd.
The bipartisan package has more than four dozen housing bills — from speeding up the process to build new homes and updating rules for manufactured houses to streamlining duplicative federal housing requirements and loosening up restrictions on community banking to increase lending for home construction.
There is widespread consensus that Congress needs to do more to make housing more affordable. How to go about it, however, has been up for much debate in halls of the U.S. Capitol.
This House package, which passed 396-13, is actually an amended version of a package the Senate passed in March, which itself was an amended version of what the House originally passed in February.
How to make housing more affordable has been a political ping pong ball, not between the two parties, but between the two chambers.
Democratic Representative Diana DeGette said Congress needs to find ways to help first time home buyers and help people who are unhoused. And she added, the House’s most recent effort eliminated some of the Senate’s “bad provisions.” For example, her chamber expanded the types of housing where people building the homes have to be paid fairly.
One example she pointed to was ensuring, “we have to have prevailing wage if we're going to be building housing so people can afford to live in it.”
Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen has a few bills in this package and said the back and forth reminds her of something former Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty told her.
“To all you freshmen,” she recalled him saying to the new crop of state legislators her first year at the statehouse, “the enemy is not the Republicans or the Democrats, it's the Senate.”
Pettersen serves on the Financial Services committee, which has been leading the legislation and says there’s a tug of war when it comes to the housing package, but she’s optimistic something can get done.
“I think that Republicans are desperate to show that they did something for the American people and to run on this campaign cycle,” she said, adding “I think that this is going to be a priority to get done, but I believe that the House version is better.”
Colorado’s senators might not agree. The Senate passed its version of the housing package — in a strong bipartisan vote.
In a statement Sen. Michael Bennet says Congress has the ability to pass comprehensive housing legislation but “there’s still work to be done.”
“I am committed to working with my colleagues in the Senate on a housing package that will pass both chambers,” he added.
Sen. John Hickenlooper is monitoring negotiations between the two versions. “He believes the housing crisis needs to be addressed as soon as possible and the (Senate) bill is one of the most comprehensive attempts to help bring down the cost of housing by building more homes and stopping corporations from dominating the housing market,” a spokesperson for Hickenlooper said.
Some of the main sticking points between the Senate and the House include deregulation around community backing to encourage more home construction and buying and how to restrict institutional investors from buying single family homes, a key priority for president Trump. The Senate version caps it at 350 homes and would require developers in the build-to-rent industry to sell after seven years. The latest House version keeps the cap, but gets rid of the requirement to sell.
“We don't want to do anything that's going to restrict the building and increase in housing supply, even if it's build-to-rent, as long as you're building it and renting it and not taking up the housing supply,” she explained. “If you're contributing to addressing this issue and giving people options, that's a good thing.
And just as the Senate left out some House priorities in its package, the latest House version leaves out Senate priorities, such as permanently authorizing grant funding for housing-related disaster assistance and Innovation funding that would target grants to communities that build more housing.
There’s at least one non-housing provision that may be problematic for House conservatives — language around banning the Federal Reserve from creating or issuing digital currency. Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert voted against this most recent House package because of that.
“I want to ban hedge funds from buying single family homes,” Boebert explained. “My issue is CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency). The language was not clear enough. There was some language in there that very much made it questionable if it's an actual ban and I want a full ban on Central Bank digital currency system.”
The language in the Senate and current House version says it’s a temporary ban.
DeGette said, "somebody needs to come in and break the log jam.” She’s not sure if President Donald Trump can do that. He backed the Senate version before he backed the most recent House version.
The issue may be on the backburner, however. There are only six legislative weeks left before the August recess and Republicans are still looking to pass their party line vote to fund immigration enforcement agencies, pass some appropriations bills, and renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
