Congress Seeks Sweeping Housing Deal Amid Key Disagreements

Why It Matters

A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report updated on May 18 offers the clearest H.R.6644 comparison yet of where the House and Senate agree, and where they don't, on what could be the most sweeping federal housing legislation in decades. The report lands as the House prepares to take up a revised draft of the bill.

Housing affordability has emerged as one of the defining domestic policy issues of this Congress, and H.R.6644 is the legislative vehicle carrying the weight of that debate. The bill touches nearly every lever of federal housing policy: mortgage finance, manufactured housing, zoning reform, environmental review, rental assistance, community development grants, banking regulation, and institutional investor activity in the single-family market.

The central tension is bicameral. The House and Senate have each passed versions of the bill with overlapping goals but meaningful structural differences. A draft revised House bill, released by the House Financial Services Committee Chairman in May 2026, attempts to bridge those gaps. Whether it succeeds will determine whether Congress can hand the administration a legislative win on housing, or whether the effort stalls.

The Big Picture

CRS Report R48922 compares three versions of the legislation: the House-passed bill from February 9, 2026; the Senate-passed version from March 12, 2026; and the draft revised House bill released this month. The Senate version incorporated elements from a separate bill, the ROAD to Housing Act of 2025, which the Senate Banking Committee had reported the previous August.

The H.R. 6644 analysis reveals broad agreement on several fronts. All three versions would raise the Community Reinvestment Act investment cap from 15 to 20 percent of a bank's unimpaired capital and surplus. All three would increase Federal Housing Administration multifamily loan limits, though the House bills propose increases in most cases more than double those in the Senate bill. All three would streamline certain National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing activities and expand the types of inspections that can satisfy Housing Choice Voucher requirements.

But the congressional bill comparison also surfaces some sharp dividing lines.

The House bill contains an entire title, Title VI, dedicated to strengthening community banks' role in housing. It includes reforms to brokered deposit rules, eased examination requirements for smaller institutions, programs supporting new bank formation, and a spending offset reducing Federal Reserve discretionary surplus funds by $115 million effective September 30, 2035. The Senate bill has no counterpart to any of these provisions, though most were carried into the draft revised House bill.

The Senate bill, meanwhile, contains several provisions with no House analog. It would eliminate the end date and unit cap for the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, potentially opening a path for all remaining public housing to eventually convert to other forms of federal rental assistance. It would also formally authorize the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Relief (CDBG-DR) program as a standing disaster recovery program, and permit a limited expansion of the Moving to Work demonstration to up to 25 additional public housing authorities. None of these appear in either House version.

On manufactured housing, all three versions would remove the longstanding permanent chassis requirement, a regulatory change that could significantly expand the types of homes eligible for federal programs. The Senate bill goes further by requiring HUD to adopt minimum energy efficiency standards for manufactured homes. The Senate bill also includes the Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement (PRICE) Program, providing competitive funds for manufactured home community preservation. The draft revised House bill does not include PRICE.

The institutional investor provisions mark another area of divergence. The Senate bill would ban large institutional investors, defined as those controlling at least 350 single-family homes, from purchasing additional one- or two-unit homes. Violations would carry civil penalties of up to $1 million or three times the purchase price. The draft revised House bill includes a parallel provision but modifies it in several ways, excluding manufactured homes, certain rental properties, and military housing from coverage, and directing HUD to establish a Renter Outreach Resource for tenants in properties owned by covered investors. The original House bill had no such provision at all.

Both the Senate bill and the draft revised House bill include a prohibition on the Federal Reserve issuing a central bank digital currency, with the draft revised House bill adding language stating that no such currency may be issued absent an act of Congress.

Political Stakes

For the administration, the bill represents an opportunity to claim credit on housing affordability without a major new spending commitment. The deregulatory provisions, particularly the NEPA streamlining and the zoning-linked Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) reallocation, align with the administration's stated interest in using federal levers to reduce local regulatory barriers to construction.

The CDBG reallocation provision, included in the Senate bill and the draft revised House bill but not the original House bill, would reduce formula funding by up to 10 percent for communities with below-median housing growth rates and redirect those funds to higher-growth communities. That is the kind of carrots-and-sticks approach to local zoning reform that housing economists have long advocated, but it also creates political exposure for members whose districts include slow-growth communities that could lose funding.

For Republicans, the community banking title is a priority. The House has signaled it is not willing to walk away from those provisions, and the draft revised House bill preserves most of them. Democrats have their own priorities, including the institutional investor restrictions and the manufactured housing preservation programs in the Senate bill, some of which did not survive into the draft revised House bill.

For the public, the stakes are straightforward: housing costs have remained elevated, and the bill's provisions on FHA loan limits, small-dollar mortgages, and zoning reform are all aimed at expanding supply and access.

The Bottom Line

The draft revised House bill is an attempt at a bicameral compromise, drawing from both the original House version and the Senate-passed bill. But it does not resolve every disagreement. Key Senate provisions, including the Rental Assistance Demonstration cap elimination, the CDBG-DR standing authorization, and the manufactured housing PRICE Program, are absent. The community banking title, a House priority with no Senate counterpart, is largely intact.

What Congress has before it is a bill with broad bipartisan architecture and enough unresolved differences to complicate final passage. Movement to come in the latter part of the week of May 18 will test whether the House can move the revised draft forward and set up a final conference, or whether the legislative versions remain too far apart to bridge.

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