Over the weekend, the most significant federal housing bill in generations became law without the president’s signature. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act aims to tackle the nation’s housing shortage and address rising costs by streamlining development processes and removing barriers to building more housing, including missing middle, affordable, and infill housing.

With the nation’s attention on housing—as limited supply and high costs continue to strain communities across the country—Congress came together on a broadly popular, bipartisan solution. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a critical first step toward addressing decades of building too few homes in the places people most want to live. Support for smaller and infill housing, policy guidance and other resources for localities, increased access to affordable housing resources, and support for manufactured homes were all key smart growth provisions, which we look forward to seeing further support and implementation.

The new law represents long-overdue federal action to address housing supply, but it falls short of directly encouraging more homes in the places where they are needed most. First, many of the bills are oriented toward single-family homes—which the market is already well-versed in supplying—while not doing enough to encourage a broader range of housing types in the walkable, connected communities where demand is highest and where prices remain out of reach for many households.

The provisions in the bill largely focus on supply-side solutions, reducing regulatory barriers, timelines, and processes to encourage more housing production as a way to reduce housing costs, while doing little to address affordability (i.e. funding affordable housing construction). Both approaches are essential to expanding housing affordability while creating better-connected and more prosperous communities.

Finally, there is a notable lack of implementation support, namely the funding to ensure these provisions will actually have their intended impact of building more housing. As the bill merely authorizes funding, Congress still has to go through the appropriations process to issue funding for the bill’s programs.

21st Century ROAD gives many new authorities and responsibilities to HUD, which is already understaffed and oversubscribed, not to mention that the current ongoing appropriations process shows no indication of increasing HUD’s resources. Congress must provide the sustained, long-term funding needed to ensure these reforms deliver on their promises and build more homes in the communities where people want to live. Without funding, these well-intentioned new programs will not deliver the housing they were created to produce.

Even with those limitations, there are several smart growth provisions that have the potential to make a meaningful impact:

• Supports smaller homes and infill housing by “right-sizing” the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) review process to speed up home construction timelines for those housing types (section 206) and by creating exemptions to NEPA for Rural Housing Service (RHS)-funded projects. (section 103)
• Provides pre-approved home plans and other design resources to streamline the development process and accelerate housing construction. (section 209)
• Increases transparency and expands access to underutilized land by creating a publicly accessible, searchable database of undeveloped land owned by local governments. (section 104)
• Provides policy guidance on zoning and land use to help communities address barriers to more housing. (section 107)
• Prioritizes resilience planning by funding the Community Development Block Grant–Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program for three years. (section 504)
• Promotes manufactured housing to reduce construction costs by authorizing the Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement (PRICE) grant program for seven years, removing outdated requirements, and increasing financing eligibility for modular and manufactured homes. (title 3)
• Protects homeownership opportunities while ensuring access to development capital by limiting large institutional investors’ purchases of single-family homes (section 1001)
• Unlocks additional private capital for affordable housing by increasing the Public Welfare Investment cap from 15 percent to 20 percent (section 203)
• Preserves older affordable housing stock by increasing access to the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program by 100,000 units and codifying tenant protections (section 212)

While these policies were enacted in the final legislation, several policies were left on the cutting room floor, including:

• Build More Housing Near Transit Act, which would have provided incentives for housing along transit corridors, a key smart growth priority that would better align housing and transportation so more people can live in connected, walkable communities.
• Identifying Regulatory Barriers to Housing Supply Act, which would have required CDBG recipients to report to HUD on their progress towards adopting a series of pro-housing land use and zoning policies, encouraging communities to modernize local rules that make it harder to build more homes.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act presents an opportunity for advocates, state and local leadership, and Members of Congress to do more to address the housing crisis. Here’s what we see as important next steps:

• The work is not done until Congress secures sufficient long-term funding so that the programs in the bill can be implemented as intended.
• State and local leaders should continue their work to modernize land-use and zoning policies to make it easier to build more homes where people want to live and take full advantage of the new tools and opportunities created by the law.
• Advocates should continue to push Congress to pass additional legislation that incorporates critical reforms in transit-oriented development, zoning, and mixed-use development to support more types of housing in well-connected places.
• Congress needs to take a whole-of-government approach to housing, identifying opportunities to address the crisis through multiple agencies and legislative vehicles, such as transportation funding.

Passing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is an important milestone, but it is not the final destination. Smart Growth America will continue working with partners across the country and with Members of Congress to turn this momentum into more progress so that every community can benefit from quality, affordable housing and access to transit.