Council Applauds Historic Federal Housing Win

It required a rare show of bipartisan resolve and took an unexpected turn at the end but the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most consequential federal housing legislation in more than three decades, is now law. The Bay Area Council welcomes the breakthrough as a meaningful federal complement to the region’s own push to build more homes and bring down costs. 

The bill rests on a principle the Council has long championed — the surest path to affordability is to build a lot more housing — and delivers a set of supply-side reforms, without any new federal spending, that speak directly to the Bay Area’s challenges:

• NEPA streamlining — Expanded categorical exclusions and delegated environmental review will speed federally supported housing projects in our high-cost jurisdictions.
• Accelerating Home Building Act — Promotes pre-approved “pattern book” designs to fast-track permitting for duplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, cottage courts, and ADUs.
• Build Now Act — Ties Community Development Block Grant funding to housing production, redirecting a share of laggard communities’ allocations into a bonus pool for those demonstrating progress.
• Single-stair guidelines — HUD model guidance and pilot funding for point-access buildings, complementing California’s own single-stair reforms.
• Commercial-to-residential conversion grants (RESIDE Act) — New pilot funding to turn vacant commercial and industrial buildings into housing, prioritizing distressed areas and Opportunity Zones.
• Permanent chassis removal — Frees manufactured homes from the steel-frame requirement, expanding a lower-cost supply option for our market.

For the Bay Area — home to some of the highest housing costs in the nation — these supply-side reforms matter most. Decades of underbuilding and permitting friction are at the root of the region’s affordability crisis, and they are precisely the barriers this bill is designed to lower. The region’s fingerprints are on the legislation itself: Silicon Valley Congressman and former San José Mayor Sam Liccardo authored five of the bills folded into the final package, an extraordinary feat for a freshman legislator.

The federal effort to cut environmental red tape echoes California’s own fight to streamline CEQA and modernize zoning, work the Council has helped lead in Sacramento and across the region. Washington’s action is no substitute for state and local reform — but it adds powerful momentum at a moment when the Bay Area can least afford to wait.