Sen. John Fetterman has sought to replicate state Sen. Nikil Saval’s Whole Home Repairs policy, which created a grant program for homeowners and small landlords to fix their properties.
Washington, D.C. Tuesday saw a rare act of bipartisan comity in Washington D.C., as the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs unanimously voted for an omnibus housing policy bill that includes a national version of a Pennsylvania program.
The bill, crafted by Committee Chairman Sen. Tim Scott (R., N.C.) and Ranking Member Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), includes provisions based on state Sen. Nikil Saval’s (D., Philadelphia) Whole Home Repairs policy, which created a grant program for income-qualifying homeowners and small landlords to fix their properties.
Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) has sought to replicate the policy at the national level in Congress since 2024 as a means to addressing the housing crisis. The Senate version includes $30 million for a national pilot program.
“I’ve been pushing Whole-Home Repairs since day one because it’s a tested solution to the housing crisis that’s already delivered real results in Pennsylvania,” said Fetterman. “The Banking Committee’s unanimous vote to advance it today proves that everyone, regardless of party, recognizes this crisis demands real solutions, not half-measures.”
The Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream to Housing Act is notable for advancing with bipartisan support on a deeply divided Capitol Hill, and because Congress rarely addresses housing policy, usually leaving the issue to states and localities.
The bill is a grab bag of existing and new housing legislation, which seeks to make home building and preservation easier by lowering federal regulatory barriers, incentivizing local governments to address exclusionary zoning, and authorizing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to create new programs including a federal version of Whole Home Repairs.
Sens. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) and Andy Kim (D., N.J.) sit on the banking committee, and voted in favor of the legislation. A key committee staffer, Madeleine Marr, formerly worked for Fetterman on housing policy issues, helped him craft his federal version of the Whole Homes Repairs legislation.
“We created Whole Home Repairs with the intention that it could be replicated in other states, but also at the national level,” said Saval. “We’re grateful for Sen. Fetterman taking a serious interest in it in 2023, and we’re glad to see it included in this exciting national bipartisan housing package.”
Otherstates have created home repair programs akin to Saval’s original bipartisan legislation passed in 2022, including Maryland, Rhode Island and Maine.
In Pennsylvania, however, the law’s momentum stalled as additional funding has repeatedly been held up in budget negotiations. Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed $50 million for a program like Pennsylvania’s Whole Home Repairs program this year, but it is unclear if it will be in the already very late state budget.
Currently the waitlist for Pennsylvania’s Whole Home Repairs program is over 18,000 homes long, and would be lengthier if many counties hadn’t already closed their lists.
What’s in the banking committee’s bill
The bipartisan support for Warren and Scott’s housing bill is partly explained by its emphasis on challenging existing regulations, mostly not funding new programs. It comes amid similar pushes at state and local levels, including a successful effort in California to weaken an environmental law that had been used to block home building, bike lanes, and mass transit projects.
The banking committee’s bill rounded up a lot of legislation that had been introduced in Congress, like the Whole Home Repairs bill, and moved it forward in this omnibus package.
“Since this new Congress started, all of a sudden, the log jam started to break on a lot of these longstanding bipartisan ideas,” said Alex Armlovich, senior housing policy analyst with the center-right Niskanen Center. “It’s more like the Schoolhouse Rock conception of D.C. than House of Cards.”
Other policies included in the Senate committee bill include directing HUD to reduce the National Environmental Protection Act’s (NEPA) regulatory requirements for federally backed multifamily housing projects.
It would also end a 1970s-era regulation that requires manufactured homes — which are assembled in factories — to be built on a “permanent chassis” so they could be wheeled away.
The rule is a throwback to when it was assumed that most single-family factory built homes would be mobile. Now, as the technology has improved, erasing the regulation would make this kind of housing much cheaper and more practical in cities.
Sen. Warren is championing a $200 million innovation fund as well, that would encourage localities to experiment with housing policies by rewarding those who lower barriers to building or craft successful construction incentives.
The Senate bill also includes tweaks to federal funding formulas for programs like Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that would allow municipalities to get more federal aid if they allow more housing to be built, and punish those that keep barriers to new building. It also specifically sites zoning laws like mandatory parking requirements as barriers to affordability.
The bill comes at a time when Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to cut HUD funding that includes reductions of $26 billion for several affordable housing programs.
The president has also zig-zagged on zoning, prompting HUD to encourage localities to liberalize their land use laws during his first administration before running as a champion of single-family suburban homes in 2020.
“After bitter controversies over the staffing, or even existence, of HUD earlier in the year it’s even more exciting that Chairman Scott and Ranking Member Warren are invested in federal housing policy in such a collegial and functional way,” said Armlovich.
