Trump Says Housing Bill Is ‘Fine’ and Hints He Will Not Veto It

President Donald Trump has reiterated his preference for a voting ID bill over the landmark housing bill on his desk, while hinting that he will not use a veto to block the housing package.

The president refused to say whether he would sign the landmark 21st Century Road to Housing Act after he abruptly canceled signing it. But he softened on the actual bill, while stating that he wanted to see Congress take action on the voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act.

“The housing bill is fine,” Trump told CNBC on Thursday. “There’s a lot of Democrat points in there. And I don’t think they’re good. But it’s fine. But I’ve made the case I’d rather not sign anything until we sign the SAVE America Act.”

As long as Trump does not use his veto power, the housing bill will automatically become law by July 10, which will mark 10 days since House Speaker Mike Johnson officially submitted it to the Oval Office. However, even a veto could be overturned by the supermajorities that backed the bill in the House and Senate, making eventual passage likely.

The House passed the bill in a 358-32 vote last week, one day after the Senate easily passed the bill by a vote of 85-5. The bill’s 45 provisions are aimed at cutting red tape and encouraging the construction of more homes.

They include constraints on institutional investors in the housing market, new banking rules aimed at promoting mortgage lending, and measures to cut red tape and speed up homebuilding.

But just as the two parties were hailing the bill as an act of bipartisanship to cut housing costs, Trump suddenly canceled the signing ceremony on Wednesday.

“Big deal, it’s a yawn,” he said of the bill a few days later. “To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”

What’s in the 21st Century Road to Housing Act

The final version of the bill includes 45 provisions across 381 pages with major implications for housing. Many of the measures are aimed at boosting housing production to address a massive national shortfall.

Realtor.com® economists estimate that the country has a shortage of more than 4 million homes, as a consequence of more than a decade of building fewer homes than were needed to meet demand.

“Among other things, the legislation aims to incentivize homebuilding by establishing policy guidelines and best practices, streamlining environmental review, and improving existing programs, including tying community development block grants to housing outcomes,” says Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale. “This last provision enables the federal government to put its finger on the scales of policymaking at the state and local level, where many of the policy and regulatory hurdles to homebuilding exist.”

The legislation also makes changes to make it easier to build and finance both manufactured and modular homes, which could bring down construction costs if used more widely.

Key provisions of the bill include the following:

• Restricting corporate buyers: Blocks Wall Street firms and large institutional investors from mass-purchasing single-family homes, backing the ban with steep financial penalties.

• Zoning reform: Creates a $200 million grant program to reward cities that eliminate restrictive zoning, while penalizing slow-growth communities by cutting their Community Development Block Grant funding by 10%.

• Cutting regulatory red tape: Accelerates construction timelines by waiving lengthy NEPA environmental reviews for low-impact HUD projects and streamlining repetitive property inspections.

• Expanding mortgage access: Launches a HUD pilot program to expand access to small-dollar mortgages below $100,000 and increases the amount of private bank capital that can be invested in local affordable housing.

• Modernizing factory-built housing: Updates FHA lending standards and draw schedules to give manufactured and modular housing financing parity with traditional, site-built homes.

• Disaster recovery fixes: Permanently authorizes the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery framework for faster postdisaster rebuilding and protects low-income rural tenants from losing rental assistance when a property’s underlying mortgage matures.

Tristan Navera is a senior reporter on housing policy, covering trends and solutions in the housing market from Washington, DC. He was previously a senior reporter at Bloomberg Law, and before that covered real estate for the Washington Business Journal. Earlier in his career, he spent a decade reporting on business and real estate in Dayton and Columbus, OH. A Cincinnati native, he holds a journalism degree from Ohio University.