This week on The Rebuild, Gary and I sat down with Rep. Josh Harder for a second time, and I’m so glad we did. Rep. Harder chairs the Bipartisan Build America Caucus and has been one of the loudest voices in Congress pushing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that, if passed cleanly, would be the most significant federal housing legislation in 50 years.

The catch: an 11th-hour amendment called Section 901. It was designed to push institutional investors out of single-family housing, which sounds good on paper and polls well. In practice, as Josh walked us through, it sweeps in the entire build-to-rent category, 72,000 new rental units a year, and forces a seven-year divestiture timeline that would effectively kill the market.

We talked about why Blackstone isn’t actually the villain people think it is, why the best way to punish corporate landlords is to build more housing, and what it’s going to take to fix Section 901 before the bill crosses the finish line. Josh and his co-chairs just released a letter with 76 bipartisan signatures trying to do exactly that– the largest bipartisan push on any substantive policy this Congress.

If you care about housing, cost of living, or just want to understand how a good bill almost gets fumbled at the five-yard line, this one’s for you.

Introduction

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m one of the co-hosts of The Rebuild, joined with our other host, Gary Winslett. Today we have a very special repeat guest with us: Representative Josh Harder. He’s a Democratic congressman representing California’s 9th District. He was first elected in 2018, flipping a Republican-held seat, and in May 2025 Harder launched the Bipartisan Build America Caucus, which focuses on reducing regulatory barriers to accelerate housing, energy, and infrastructure development. He serves as its chair.

Harder has been active in pushing for federal housing reform, including the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a major housing package currently under consideration, with a lot of debate around provisions like Section 901. That’s going to be the ongoing theme of this conversation, so we’ll dive right in.

Representative Harder, how are you today?

Rep. Josh Harder: I’m doing great. It’s good to be with you.

Tahra Hoops: For listeners who haven’t tracked every single twist and turn of this bill (and there have been many), would you give us the quick spiel on what the now-amended 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act actually does, and why we’re calling it the most significant federal housing bill in decades?

Overview of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

Rep. Josh Harder: This bill is a little bit of a franken-bill that combines about 27 other bills into one whole. But I really break it down into a couple of different categories.

First, this creates incentives for cities and counties, local leaders across the country, to build more housing. If they build more, they’re going to get more money from the federal government.

It also repeals a lot of red tape in things like the HUD building code. The big thing there is the repeal of the chassis rule, which is preventing us from building manufactured housing. As you and your listeners probably know, we’ve had very little, if any, construction productivity growth for many decades. So this repeal is a chance to actually lower housing costs by building more homes in factories, a really exciting move in the right direction.

And third, it also expands categorical exemptions from federal permit review so we can actually build housing faster. This is the same sort of thing you’ve seen in states like California and others that have passed real pro-housing legislation over the last couple of years, the federal complement to that.

It does a lot of great things, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been pushing for it for the last couple of months. We’re hoping we can fix a couple of the last provisions and get this across the finish line for good.

Gary Winslett: Before some of these provisions that we’re going to talk about got added, this was something to be really excited about. The first iteration that went through the House, I was just amazed at how good of a bill this was.

Rep. Josh Harder: That’s right. This is our first chance to pass a federal housing bill in 50 years, so I think it’s really an exciting moment. It’s turned bittersweet, unfortunately, but that shouldn’t cause us to lose hope. We’ve come to this because of such a huge grassroots mobilization across the country to finally bring up housing as a federal issue.

There’s been so much growth at a state and local level over the last decade or two. This is the first time we really have a moment at the federal level, and there are so many good ideas in this bill that are going to do a ton of good.

One thing I’m really excited about is that this helps build more pro-growth zoning practices for cities that actually want to grow. We’re very consumed sometimes with cities that don’t want to do anything, but there’s a whole section of cities out there that really want to build more housing. They just don’t know how. This bill is going to have a lot of support to make sure those folks can actually pass pro-growth measures that accelerate more housing construction. So yes, there’s a whole lot of good things in here, and it’s the result of years of hard work.

The Build America Caucus & Energy Permitting

Gary Winslett: I’d love to talk about how it fits into your broader political trajectory. You launched the Build America Caucus last year to cut red tape, to get federal housing, energy, and infrastructure projects actually built. Where does ROAD fit into that broader project?

Rep. Josh Harder: This is our top priority this Congress. It’s the reason we created the caucus, because there really was not a hub for this type of work. This work spans a lot of different congressional committees, and we wanted something that would be a little more collaborative. Frankly, there are also a lot of folks who weren’t on the main committee that manages housing (the Financial Services Committee in the House) who wanted to be involved in this work. We knew it was going to be bipartisan, we knew it was going to get a lot of momentum, and that’s why we created it in the first place.

The second big effort we’re working on in conjunction with this housing bill is an effort to get an energy permitting bill across the finish line, to make it easier to build energy and lower costs, which I think is especially important when we’re seeing demand growth in artificial intelligence and data center construction across the country. That’s our second priority. But this housing effort is really the reason we constructed this caucus in the first place.

Gary Winslett: It would be really great to see. It was so disappointing when we didn’t get EPRA across the line in the last Congress. So it would be really great to see its successor be really good and do well.

Rep. Josh Harder: There’s some real momentum. There are ongoing negotiations. Ultimately, we need a lot of trust. This administration has unfortunately created a bit of a political vendetta against clean energy projects. They’ve canceled solar projects that were days away from construction and actually offering power to homes.

One real precondition for getting an energy permitting bill across the line is going to be some type of guarantee that this administration is actually going to support all-of-the-above energy, not just fossil fuels, which they clearly love, but nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal. If we can get that type of commitment, the policy here is pretty well understood, with broad bipartisan agreement behind it. Really, the limiting factor at this moment is the trust to actually get a deal.

Tahra Hoops: Trust seems to be a major key when it comes to any energy infrastructure project. Before we go off on a major tangent, it is just so politically salient right now. When you’re going outside in your car and you see gas prices being screamed at you, and at the end of the month you’re getting utility bills, knowing that remains a major priority for your caucus is always reassuring for us to hear.

But to shift gears a little bit and get back into the nitty gritty:

Section 901 Explained

Tahra Hoops: Could you walk us through what Section 901 (which sounds very wonky as it is) actually is, how it kind of got snuck in there, and why we might have some faults with it?

Rep. Josh Harder: There’s been a lot of concern over the last couple of years about institutional investment in single-family homes. Think about this as Blackstone or BlackRock (sometimes people get a little confused in the memes online) buying all the homes across the country, and that’s the reason housing prices are so high.

I think most of the policy wonks who look at this issue will tell you that’s not entirely true. Institutional owners have less than 1% of the single-family housing stock across the country. But in some areas it can be a lot higher: in metro Atlanta, for instance, more than 30% of single-family homes are owned by institutional investors.

So certainly it is a concern, and there’s been bipartisan agreement on it. Trump has talked about this in his State of the Union, and he’s tweeted a lot about it as well. He’s said this is something we really need to fix. We need to get large hedge funds and private equity firms out of the housing business. That’s gotten a lot of support from the left wing of the Democratic Party as well, which is always skeptical about corporate ownership.

There are real concerns there, and that’s why ultimately, in this bill, there was an 11th-hour change to put in a provision that would put some real limits on institutional ownership in the housing market. I think it was well-intentioned. Unfortunately, because it was drafted at the last minute and didn’t really have time to be heavily vetted, it has some real unintended consequences.

This is Section 901 (that’s the section in the bill), and effectively it’s going to halt the production of a part of the housing industry called the build-to-rent category, which right now is building 72,000 new rental units per year, especially in areas of the Sun Belt like Arizona, where these are just going up like wildfire.

So this provision is going to push out renters. It’s going to destabilize housing through mandatory divestment timelines that are going to compel these owners to sell their property and ultimately displace the renters who live there right now.

The way I think about this and explain it to folks: it’s like trying to solve a food shortage by banning supermarkets. You are punishing the folks who are building the housing that’s actually going to address the crisis we’re seeing all across the country.

Institutional Investors & Build-to-Rent Concerns

Gary Winslett: My mom actually lives in one of these rented build-to-rent houses. She’s got a family member of mine with mental illness challenges, and they just need a house. But they don’t have the money to own one, so they rent one of these build-to-rents.

If the company that manages that is forced to sell it because there’s supposedly some evil landlord, she’s got to move. I just don’t think that’s the intention people have when they think about institutional investors. As you noted, it’s less than 1% of the single-family homes. How did this become such a thing people focus on?

Rep. Josh Harder: Everybody looks for a villain in politics. When you’re frustrated by the state of affairs, you want to find somebody to blame. So it’s no surprise that when we’ve seen housing prices grow more than double the rate of inflation over the last couple of decades, and when most young people can’t afford a house, there’s going to be a lot of anger out there. Somebody’s going to take advantage of that and try to divert it onto somebody else. Especially at a time when people are really skeptical of Wall Street (and understandably so), there’s going to be a lot of blame thrown on private equity.

I think there’s a lot of damage private equity often does. You see consolidation in markets like healthcare where it really is a problem to have so much consolidation. But transferring that to the housing market is a very different situation, where there’s so much capital out there but ultimately most homes are owned by the people who live there, or by landlords that own just a couple of properties. I think the situation here is just that people are really frustrated and they want to have somebody on the other side who’s been responsible for creating all of these problems. Because if it was that easy, we could just fix it. We could just ban institutional investment and all of a sudden tomorrow housing prices would become affordable all across the country.

Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen. It’s because we haven’t built enough housing. If we need to build millions of new units, that’s what we need to be focused on.

The analogy here: if you actually look at the filings of some of these companies, if you look at Blackstone’s filings, they will talk about how one of the biggest risks to their housing portfolio is the risk that we might actually build more homes. Because if we do that, it would actually lower the value of their investments. So I tell folks, if you’re really frustrated about corporate ownership, the best way to stick it to ‘em is actually to deal with the supply issues and build the homes that we can all live in.

Gary Winslett: That’s exactly right. When we build more supply, you have a lot more power on the side of the buyers and renters rather than the landlords, because now it’s the landlords who have to compete to find somebody to live in the house, not the renters trying to compete with each other over a very limited stock.

Rep. Josh Harder: Yeah, absolutely. You can see this time and time again. Abuses by landlords go down when we build more homes. It’s totally obvious. When you have an alternative, where you can move across the street if you don’t like the person managing your home, then you have those options. The best way to give power to the people is to build the homes for them to live in.

Tahra Hoops: It’s funny that this has such strong bipartisan appeal, and why Trump has been very vocal in his Truth Social posts about it, because he’s aware that people are very upset with the economy, as much as he’ll go on TV and say otherwise. But rather than changing some of his policies, like tariffs on construction material (which won’t help) or deporting our entire construction workforce (which also won’t help), doing things like that would be actual tangible efforts to lower the price of housing. But he doesn’t want to do that, because those are his favorite pet policies.

So now he can jump in on this because his team will tell him it’s going to poll well, it’s salient to voters. He can put a very tiny Band-Aid on this, and to him, he’s fixed the problem. He can point to it and say, “I signed that, I got that across.” And while we know it won’t make any meaningful difference, what’s going to happen is that by the time people start to notice, he may be out of office, and we’re still stuck with the issue, which has grown even harder.

But I wanted to get back to the specifics of the bill. Obviously, as we mentioned, it kind of snuck in at the very last minute, to the point that even Senator Schatz at one point said it was a mistake. But clearly it was not: it’s something that’s been doubled down on.

Problems with the Current Language

Tahra Hoops: Where do you think the current language overshoots itself? Would it be just the investor ban in general, or the fact that the text also catches net-new build-to-rent or renovate-to-rent housing?

Rep. Josh Harder: I think the two biggest problems are the overly wide definition of what actually constitutes institutional ownership, and the divestiture timelines.

It’d be a very different situation if you were saying there was a 30-year investment window for you to actually build a home, rent it out, and then maybe someday down the road you had to sell it, maybe to the person who lived there. Right now, the seven-year window that exists, given how long it actually takes to build a home, get all the permits, and do the construction, is just way too short. It would functionally completely kill this market.

And then of course, as Gary said, you’re including a lot of folks, like the entire build-to-rent category, that just don’t belong here. This isn’t what people have a problem with. This isn’t some Wall Street billionaire owning a home and then doubling rents the next day. These are people actually building new homes.

I think it’s unbelievably ironic that a bill all about trying to build more homes could very well have the opposite impact, which would be an absolute catastrophe. It would break my heart if we spent all this work trying to get something across the line, and it actually had the unintended consequence opposite of what we’ve all been working for.

This is actually a very easy problem to solve if we want to solve it. The challenge is that there’s just so much desire from the White House and from folks in the Senate who are pretty wedded to an anti-corporate position that it’s going to be a little challenging getting folks to get to yes here.

But we released a letter yesterday that had 76 signatures of members of Congress. That is a big deal. Just to put that in context, that is the largest bipartisan push for any substantive bill this Congress, for the last year and a half. And it was more than half Democrats, half Republicans, actually a few more Republicans than Democrats in the end. That tells you there is a huge groundswell of feeling that we can get this fixed while retaining the momentum and passing the bill.

Worst-Case Scenarios

Gary Winslett: You told The Dispatch that you’re worried about fumbling at the five-yard line. If 901 stays in there as currently drafted, as you say fumbling at the five-yard line, what do you think the worst-case scenario is if that actually comes to pass?

Rep. Josh Harder: The two worst-case scenarios are passing this bill as-is, or not passing the bill at all. Neither of those are acceptable, and that’s why we have to thread the needle here. We want to keep this momentum. The fact that we could pass the first housing bill in 50 years is a really important moment. This 11th-hour change that unfortunately has gotten a lot of bipartisan support has a real risk of pushing us in the wrong direction.

But the second big risk: we pass this bill as-is, and the benefits turn out to be less than we’re hoping. The chassis rule doesn’t actually produce more manufactured housing. The incentives might not be enough money to cause cities to change their behavior. But the bans are pretty well defined. So unfortunately, one big consequence could be that this bill stops more housing than it actually stimulates. The reason that’s such a big deal is that 72,000 homes a year, over a 10-year timeframe, is a lot of homes.

Blue State Exodus & Political Messaging

Tahra Hoops: All of this is coming to a head while we’re having conversations on the side and noticing the data is showing us we’re facing a blue-state and blue-city exodus. It’s an immediate problem because it shows that people are looking around at the places they live in and the elected leaders they believe in, and they just don’t find it worthwhile to live there. It will also become an electoral problem: if we lose that, it’s going to make races that much harder to win.

I think we have to come to a whole stop as a Democratic Party and look within ourselves and understand: people are leaving for a reason. If you look under the hood, you do see housing is going to be the largest driver of it all. So it would be a logical next step to make it easier to build.

It gets to the point where it almost sounds a little boring to keep saying the same thing over and over, “build, baby, build,” but it keeps refraining from happening. And circling back to the seven-year timeline you gave: that is incredibly short in the period of getting to permits, getting to actual building, getting someone into a home. By the time that happens, it absolutely makes no sense to just build that home.

There is a popular show right now called Euphoria. The main subplot is a lot of crime, drugs, crazy stuff. And then there’s one subplot of one of the developers: he just became a developer, he took over his dad’s business, and he’s trying to build in California. Every other scene is like, “Have you tried getting permits here?” I find it so funny that it’s worked its way into a very popular show. No one has any clue how important this is to me as a policy wonk, and it is really hard to get permitting over the line here.

So what I ask you is: we are in a midterm year, and we do know that not having Wall Street in homes polls well. How do we make this message more politically feasible to the average voter who’s not going to spend as much time on this?

Rep. Josh Harder: You’re totally right on the exodus from blue states. I saw just last week that California is going to lose a million school-age children, which is a challenge to our public school system. We’re just seeing a shrinking in blue states because people can’t afford to live there. It’s not that they don’t want to. I talk to folks all the time whose kids are moving out of state because they just can’t find a home to buy.

But I actually think the two bigger reasons are even more important. One is just the economic opportunity that is limited when you can’t actually buy homes. The best way to see it: with the AI boom in the Bay Area, so many folks are concerned about what AI is going to do to jobs. This is clearly a very productive moment. There are a lot of millionaires and billionaires being minted in San Francisco. Every other time we’ve had a virtual gold rush like that, we’ve seen a huge flood of folks from across the country going into that area to make sure that economic opportunity is shared by all.

That was quite literally the Gold Rush. That’s how my family got to California. My great-great-grandfather got on a wagon train in 1850, and I think if it was a million dollars to buy a home in California, he probably would not have pushed that wagon train all the way into the state. The fact that we’re not able to build housing essentially means we’re not going to make sure that the economic opportunity created by any of these superstar cities is actually shared by enough people.

The second issue I really care about is just the enormous amount of cynicism and apathy about our political process, and life itself, when you can’t actually afford to buy a home. People are really angry out there, and that’s one of the reasons we have to fight back some of the provisions that might not actually make people happier, like banning build-to-rent housing. That cynicism is so potent because people don’t believe they’re actually going to have a life better than their parents. The most important reason for that is they don’t think they’re ever going to own their own home.

There are so many negative effects that come from this housing crisis. This is probably one of the most important policy issues we have across the country, and we are right at the moment where we can actually get this solved.

To your question of how we do it: I think we have to work on people’s minds instead of their hearts. In their hearts, everybody gets this. But the analytical part of our brain sometimes shuts down when we think about housing. We have to persuade people that, on this issue where everybody wants to make it more affordable to own a home, the best way to do it is actually not by banning some of the folks who are doing that right now. It feels like it should be more intuitive than it is, but unfortunately that’s clearly not the case. If we can actually show folks that what they’re trying to do would do the opposite, we can hopefully get a little more momentum.

Gary Winslett: On working with where people are, I’ve found the analogy that works for me the best is asking people: what do you think would happen to the price of used cars if you banned new cars? Any used car that was still in really good working condition, now that’s what rich people are going to want to buy up. That’s just going to jack up the prices of all the used cars underneath them. You’ve got to be able to break it down in those kinds of ways that people get.

Rep. Josh Harder: Absolutely. That’s a great analogy. It’s odd that people understand supply and demand in so many different ways, but when it comes to housing there’s often a little bit of a blind spot. I think that blind spot is just: people don’t believe it’s going to happen. They see the cost, but they’re very skeptical the benefits are ever going to be shared.

The only antidote to that skepticism is reality itself. When people visit a city like Austin, where rents have fallen, they start to say, “Hey, it is possible to live in a city that a lot of people want to live in and not pay through the nose,” although it’s still pretty expensive there. If we can get out of the unfortunate loop we’re in right now, back to a virtuous cycle where people actually see the housing being built, they see prices fall. My hope is that virtuous cycle can be sustained. But we have to force ourselves back onto it first.

Tahra Hoops: Yeah, I think once people start to actually see results is when the tides will change. A lot of people are just acting from a place of scarcity and financial nihilism. People don’t believe it can get any better, so they don’t want anyone to get let in, because right now they already feel like it’s not even enough for them.

That’s why JD Vance has been so popular in putting the narrative that it’s just an immigration issue: it’s not that we don’t have housing, we just have too many people here. But to me, that’s anti-liberalism in itself, to instead say, “No, we’re closed, we can’t welcome you anymore.” And that’s why we have the housing crisis we have now.

It just is mind-boggling to me, because a wealthy country would instead look and say, “Let’s build more so we can welcome more people in and have a better future for all.” To me, that is the most American ideal you could have.

Rep. Josh Harder: Not only is it nihilistic. Go to any housing construction site and you’re going to see immigrants. I mean, those are literally the people building our housing. Not only is it anti-liberal. If you are super anti-immigrant and conservative, you still should want to make sure we have more immigration to actually build the homes that people live in. Because let me tell you: if you walk around the construction sites I see, you’re going to hear a lot of Spanish.

Closing Thoughts

Tahra Hoops: Well, I think that is all the time we have. Thank you so much, Representative Harder, for being on here and for doing the work that you’re doing. I did not know that was the largest bipartisan signage you have on that letter, so just seeing what an incredible feat is happening behind the scenes here, it’s very encouraging for us to see and hear, and I’m sure for the readers and watchers as well. So thank you again.

Rep. Josh Harder: Thank you for the work you’re doing. Now let’s go out and get it done.

Gary Winslett: Thanks.

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