The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act channeled a groundswell of bipartisan momentum on housing reform that was years in the making. The energy and interest around housing affordability offers an opportunity to build on this success, elevate new ideas from the field, and shape federal rental assistance and support policies to achieve a future of broad housing opportunity, access, and stability.  

As housing costs soar and wages don't keep pace, households across the country are getting left behind, and many are struggling to maintain stable housing or getting priced out of their communities altogether. While we focus on the important task of building additional housing stock, we also need to ensure that people can access that housing and the other resources they need to thrive. To overcome the growing challenge of housing unaffordability, we’ll need a movement to reform and strengthen our country’s rental assistance. 

The coalition that supported ROAD was built over years, through sustained policy development, evidence-building, and advocacy. A movement to improve rental assistance policies and expand housing access and opportunity will require the same investment and focus.
 

The Role of Federal Rental Assistance  

More than 10 million people currently receive some form of federal rental assistance. The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, the largest federal tenant-based rental assistance program, serves 2.4 million of those households.  

Yet roughly half of all renter households are cost-burdened, paying more than 30 percent of income on housing. NLIHC’s 2025 Gap Report found only 35 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households nationwide, and federal rental assistance programs serve just one in four households that qualify for them due to lack of funding. Even for households that participate in the HCV program, roughly four in ten cannot find a home within their allotted search window, losing their assistance and cycling back onto waitlists that can last for years.  

Increases in homelessness, particularly in high-cost, low-vacancy places, are also linked to the scarcity of rental assistance resources. The overwhelming majority of households experiencing homelessness would qualify for and benefit from a Housing Choice Voucher, further demonstrating its critical role in an effective housing system.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act gives us the opportunity to close some of those gaps. The same energy that led to its enactment can be channeled towards advancing reforms to streamline and strengthen the HCV program, give Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) more room to innovate, and scale promising ideas that are already working at the state and local level.  

Streamlining Program Requirements

Federal rental assistance can be streamlined to ensure vouchers get into the hands of households who need them and reduce administrative burdens for PHAs, tenants, and landlords.

Widespread landlord participation is central to the functioning of the HCV program, but navigating the program’s inspection requirements can pose challenges. That complexity is one reason landlords in high-demand neighborhoods have opted of out the program, limiting the housing choices available to voucher holders.

ROAD takes meaningful steps to change this. The bill includes provisions that allow properties financed through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, HOME, and the USDA Rural Housing Service to automatically satisfy HCV inspection requirements if they have passed an inspection within the past year. It also enables new landlords to request advance inspections, reducing the uncertainty that makes many prospective landlords hesitant to engage with the program in the first place.  

Even before ROAD was enacted, PHAs across the country were seeking ways to incentivize landlord participation in the HCV program with tools ranging from dedicated landlord liaisons to security deposit assistance and damage protection funds.  

Streamlining reforms can also directly address tenant concerns. For example, implementation rules for the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act (HOTMA) that took effect in 2024 allow households with fixed incomes to complete a full income review once every three years rather than annually. PHAs can draw on income data already verified through SNAP, Medicaid, and other federal programs rather than requiring families to assemble documentation from scratch.  

Extending and building on these reforms would give landlords and households a more stable experience with the program, while freeing up PHA staff time for the casework and outreach that improves lease-up outcomes.

Adopting an Innovation Mentality

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress unlocked administrative flexibilities for rental assistance programs — like remote hearings and family income self-certification. Learning what worked best from these expanded flexibilities, and scaling the most effective ideas, should be an integral part of a new rental assistance agenda.  

HUD’s Moving to Work (MTW) demonstration, which grants participating PHAs the flexibility to design and test locally tailored approaches to meet their goals, has also provided ample examples of successful innovations. As national HCV success rates declined in 2021 and 2022, MTW agencies largely maintained higher lease-up rates. Initiatives like the King County Housing Authority’s While in School Housing (WISH) Program, which provides housing support for college students experiencing homelessness, show how PHAs can use the expanded tools of the MTW demonstration to better meet the needs of their communities and help advance economic mobility for program participants.  

ROAD's expansion of MTW by up to 25 PHAs creates new opportunities for this kind of experimentation and could inform future legislative action to expand the tools available to all PHAs.

Spotlighting Lessons from the Field

State and local level programs provide a wellspring of new ideas to strengthen federal rental assistance.  

For example, Chicago and Baltimore have stood up housing and mobility counseling programs to support HCV participants as they search for a home, facilitating access to high-opportunity neighborhoods.  

State and local governments have also been building momentum in support of source of income (SOI) protections, which prohibit landlords from discriminating against renters who rely on vouchers or other non-traditional sources of income. Ten states, the District of Columbia, and roughly 50 counties and cities have enacted these protections. However, they currently cover only about a third of voucher holders nationwide, leaving significant room for expansion.  

While still in their infancy, several pilots across the country have also started demonstrating the viability of direct rental assistance (DRA). Unlike vouchers, which deliver payments to landlords on tenants’ behalf, DRA provides cash-based housing assistance payments directly to tenants. The positive track record of pilots like PHLHousing+ — which significantly reduced rates of eviction and homelessness among participants — challenges traditional assumptions about rental assistance delivery and points toward exciting avenues for future reforms at the federal level.

Building on Our Momentum

Making the most of the opportunities created by ROAD will require a commitment to strengthening federal policies that expand housing access and opportunity, matching the political urgency, methodological rigor, and innovative bent of the movement for housing supply reform. These efforts are complementary: stronger rental assistance will help fulfill the promise of newly unlocked supply, and new supply will allow assistance to stretch further, providing more families with the opportunity to live close to jobs, education, amenities, and communities of their choosing.

Several ideas point the way. Applying Small Area Fair Market Rents, which calibrate payment standards to local zip codes rather than metro area averages, would give HCV participants greater purchasing power in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Expanding HCV portability across PHAs would let participants follow jobs, education, and other opportunities without running into mobility-limiting rules that currently tie a voucher to a single housing authority. And continuing to streamline recurring processes like inspections and recertifications would cut administrative friction for all program participants and facilitate lease-up.  

The coalition that supported ROAD was built over years, through sustained policy development, evidence-building, and advocacy. A movement to improve rental assistance policies and expand housing access and opportunity will require the same investment and focus. Enterprise is committed to helping build it.

Find out more about Enterprise's rental assistance advocacy on our 21st Century ROAD to Housing Resources page.