Senate Majority Leader John Thune plans to put an updated version of a bipartisan housing affordability bill on the Senate floor for a vote this week.
That version of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will include most of the House-passed language, a provision restricting large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, and would add back Senate bills that were dropped from the House package, two people familiar with the bill dynamics and two Senate Democratic aides said.
The updated package emerged after talks between Thune, Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and it was discussed with the House and the White House, the aides said.
Still, it is unclear whether House leadership and the White House have signed off on the legislation, the aides said.
Both chambers previously passed their own versions of the housing bill — the Senate 89-10 in March, and the House 396-13 in May — and the White House initially supported the Senate-passed bill before backing the House-passed bill after it retained most of the Senate's language on reining in private equity and other large Wall Street investors, a top priority for President Donald Trump, the two people and two aides said.
The Senate’s updated legislation would remove two of the House’s community banking deregulation bills because of budget scoring concerns; those two bills would modify the Federal Deposit Insurance Act around failed insured depository institutions, two people familiar said.
It would also add back a provision to authorize the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program for seven years rather than a permanent reauthorization in the Senate’s March legislation, the people said.
Senators reinserted several upper-chamber priorities, including the BUILD NOW Act to incentivize communities to build more housing through the Community Development Block Grant program; the Rental Assistance Demonstration bill to raise the cap on housing authorities converting voucher-based assistance; the Moving to Work bill to add a new cohort of MTW public housing agencies; and the VALID Act, which would require Federal Housing Administration mortgage disclosures to include cost comparison information for veterans, the people said.
The package retains core wins for the leaders of both the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees and reflects input from all four leaders of those panels, one of the people familiar said.