By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON, June 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives passed bipartisan legislation on Tuesday that aims to speed the construction and availability of more affordable housing, sending it to President Donald Trump to be signed into law.
The measure passed the Senate on Monday by a vote of 85-5.
"America is facing a housing supply shortage that's been years in the making," House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill of Arkansas, a Republican, said during House debate
on the bill.
A majority of American consumers have said, for the first time since 2023, that they would prefer to buy a home rather than rent or move in with family members, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
Hill said the measure would "cut unnecessary barriers to new home construction" and modernize what he said were outdated banking regulations, to facilitate more home loans to lower-income people.
The House voted 358-32 to pass the bill.
Passage of such major legislation in the deeply divided Congress has been rare. Democratic Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut called the bill "a remarkable thing."
There is an estimated shortage of millions of affordable homes in the United States, according to housing industry groups.
The combination of high mortgage rates, rising home prices and supply chain problems over the past several years has contributed to consumers' difficulties.
The bill, which has been written and rewritten several times by House and Senate negotiators over the past year, gives Republicans and Democrats an accomplishment to tout on the campaign trail in the run-up to November congressional elections.
The high cost of living in the U.S., with the inflation rate rising significantly during Trump's second term in office, is ranked as a top worry by voters in public opinion polls.
Among other main provisions of the bill are waiving or speeding up environmental reviews for home construction projects and placing a cap on the number of already constructed single-family homes that big Wall Street investors can own.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Edmund Klamann)
