The House of Representatives voted 390-9 in a Monday night session to pass the bipartisan Housing in the 21st Century Act.
According to combined media reports, the bill seeks to update local development and rural housing programs while expanding manufactured and affordable housing opportunities. The bill also calls for boosting the mortgage origination levels by community banks.
Conspicuously absent from the bill is President Trump’s initiative to restrict institutional investors from acquiring single-family homes. The Trump administration did not issue a comment on the bill’s passage, although Financial Services Chairman French Hill (R-AR) said he would negotiate with the administration to get its support.
Hill will also need to negotiate with his Senate counterparts, which passed their own ROAD to Housing Act with provisions not included in the House version. But the Senate bill seeks to expand several federal grant programs that many House Republicans do not support, and Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is not enthusiastic about negotiating.
“ROAD to Housing is a Jenga tower. Adding or taking things away risks losing the unanimous coalition that we have built in the Senate,” Warren said, adding she did not approve the House’s focus on community banking. “House Republicans should not hold housing relief hostage to push forward several bank deregulatory bills that will make our community banks more fragile,” Warren said in a statement before Monday’s House vote.
Suspending or eliminating the capital gains tax on rental real estate would bring many properties to market very quickly.
No doubt about it!
If you take away capital gains you will see more investors on lower end properties. That means they are bringing properties back into the market, more rentals, etc.
We have seen Institutional Investors buy groups of houses 100 to 400 at a time, they have remote management companies and low standards causing both a loss of those homes from family buyers and terrible non-screened tenants! This will allow more families to be able to have some housing inventory and that is vital for long term ownership.