After years of unrelenting advocacy and collaboration with elected officials and housing advocates, Liz Osborn and her colleagues were ready to celebrate when the most comprehensive housing bill since 1990 cleared the House and Senate with rare bipartisan support.
But the champagne and high-fives had to be put on hold after a planned signing on Capitol Hill was canceled in late June.
Fast forward to last Friday and the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — designed to increase the housing supply, accelerate disaster recovery, and modernize essential programs — was ultimately enacted. The path to becoming a law was longer than anticipated, but enactment brings optimism for its potential to improve housing affordability across the country.
How did the bill make it over the finish line? It was both a multiyear marathon and a final surge of activity, said Osborn, Enterprise’s vice president of policy.
"While the broader package came together with this Congress, years of advocacy building bipartisan support for individual sections made all the difference," Osborn said. “As you get closer to a vote, there can be a lot of scrambling around language, both on the Hill and from the field. It’s critical to weigh in at exactly the right moments."
We spoke to Osborn about how the bipartisan bill came to be, what Enterprise Community Partners did to push it forward, and why the next phase — implementation — is crucial.
The bill passed with huge bipartisan support. Is there anything unique about this moment that made it possible for a housing bill of this magnitude to pass this year?
Housing has long had bipartisan backing, as we’ve seen with annual appropriations bills and major tax packages that have included housing language. But for authorizing legislation to move, you need a perfect storm that raises the issue to the top of everyone’s priority list.
Members of Congress who always cared about housing started hearing about it everywhere they went. Constituents were bringing up housing in town halls and unrelated meetings. When you have voters talking consistently about a single issue in every state and district across the country, it gets attention.
Where and when did Enterprise’s advocacy make the biggest difference?
This victory was the collaborative work of members of Congress and their staff, advocates, practitioners, and stakeholders throughout the housing field and across the country.
Authorizing legislation is unique because it happens so rarely — unlike appropriations which moves every year, and tax packages which may move once every five or ten years. Authorizing legislation like this hasn’t moved in a very long time. Still, you don’t get to take a break from advocacy for the years or decades in between — that’s actually where a lot of the real work is done.
I feel so fortunate to work at Enterprise because we have such a high-capacity policy team. A big part of that is thanks to the work that is done across the rest of the organization. Enterprise has experts in every aspect of housing — from development, to programs, to property management, to sustainability. We can pull from all that expertise and work directly with members of Congress to develop policy solutions that work for the people we all serve.
Many of the policy proposals in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that Enterprise led on were introduced and shaped with lawmakers several Congresses ago. The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) permanent authorization, for example, is something we’ve been advocating on for nearly a decade. The Rural Housing Service Reform Act and HOME reauthorization language are also examples that have taken years of hard work from champions both on the Hill and off to get to this point.
These are just three examples out of dozens in 21st Century ROAD that will yield tangible results across the country. Authorizing CDBG-DR will get critically important recovery dollars out to communities recovering from disasters much faster and more equitably. The Rural Housing Service Reform Act will preserve rental assistance for nearly 400,000 rural renters who otherwise would have lost it due to an outdated law. The changes made to the HOME program will strengthen one of our most flexible tools for housing finance.
Which provisions are especially important to housers?
Certainly, the three I just mentioned, but there are many sections that could be game-changing if they’re taken advantage of fully. To name a few that have high potential but require opt-in from the field:
- Rental Assistance Demonstration expansion: Allows an additional 100,000 public housing units to access financing for repairs, refinancing, and long-term preservation.
- Voucher and rental-assistance streamlining: Makes it easier for landlords to participate and for families to use assistance more quickly.
- Public welfare investment cap increase: Gives banks more room to invest in tools such as Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and New Markets Tax Credits.
Some people are calling this a first step. What needs to happen next?
Congress makes laws; the administration and other stakeholders then get to implement them. The bill’s passage is only the first deadline. The next one is implementation. Each section of the law requires different next steps, and for many of them, federal agencies will need to write regulations. Advocates and practitioners have an important role to play now in helping to shape how the programs will actually work on the ground.
The other interesting point is that this is not a funding bill — it incentivizes other private and public capital, improves existing programs, and creates new ones, but there aren’t any federal dollars associated with it. For those new programs to actually get off the ground, they’re going to need federal appropriations.
What is the next advocacy effort for Enterprise?
It’s exciting to think about what comes next, especially as we reflect on a remarkable couple of years for federal housing policy, where we have seen the enactment of many of our policy priorities. I’m excited to work again with our experts throughout Enterprise and across the country to identify which priorities to advance for the next authorizing package, whether that’s next year or a few decades from now.
What are the biggest lessons you are taking away from this process?
First, bipartisanship is not dead. It’s important to work with both parties, and when Republicans and Democrats come together, we can accomplish a lot.
Second, preparation matters. It’s hard to wait until the eleventh hour and make a significant impact. Relationship building, policy development, advocacy, and coalition building have to happen long before a bill is in the news.
Working alongside the members of Congress, their staff, and housers across the field to shape and enact this law has been an enormous privilege. Let’s celebrate, implement, and then do it again.
