Congress just passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act as a bipartisan effort to tackle our housing challenges, but according to HousingWire reporting, the real work is just beginning. The legislation includes over fifty provisions that will require HUD to write new regulations and guidance before any of these improvements can actually help families find homes. It's a landmark achievement, but implementation is where things get tricky.
The concern here comes from looking back at history. When the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act became law back in 2016, everyone celebrated it as major reform to HUD programs. But it took seven years just to finish writing the final regulations, and even now, more than a decade later, the law still isn't fully implemented. The author of this piece is essentially warning us that if ROAD moves at that pace, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment. Many of the programs ROAD aims to improve are already too complicated for people to navigate effectively.
The real problem isn't just red tape for red tape's sake. According to the reporting, there's this fundamental friction built into how housing programs work. The author points to a specific example from San Francisco where one affordable housing project cost more than a million dollars per unit, with an application that ran 359 pages. That kind of bureaucratic burden means fewer homes get built with the same amount of federal money. The argument being made is that our biggest constraint right now isn't a lack of funding but a lack of effective execution.
Here's where the reporting gets interesting. Instead of having HUD write regulations in isolation and then get feedback later, the suggestion is to bring developers, nonprofits, lenders, and other practitioners into the process from day one. This collaborative approach could provide agencies with practical expertise right at the start, rather than spending years revising based on complaints that come after rules are published. The author makes clear this doesn't violate the Administrative Procedures Act because it's about transparency and making the process better informed, not creating secret backroom deals.
What I am seeing locally in the Bay Area is that we have genuinely talented people trying to work within systems that make even good intentions difficult to execute. When a single affordable housing project requires that kind of financial and administrative burden, it means we're building fewer homes per dollar spent, which directly affects families who need options in an expensive market like ours.
