What’s in the New Bipartisan Housing Bill That Congress Just Passed

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0:33Rebecca Picciotto:Tech stocks continue to struggle as concerns of an AI bubble loom. But some chip makers are forging ahead. Plus, President Trump meets with Senate Republicans amid his latest push for controversial voter ID rules. And what's in the newly passed housing bill that could be one of the biggest changes to federal housing policy in decades? The bill is generally something that the real estate industry likes. You know, it sends a message to local leaders that you want to streamline regulations and make it easier to build. So the real estate industry broadly sees this bill as a victory. It's Wednesday, June 24th.

1:08Rebecca Picciotto:I'm Alex Oseleff for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. Starting off this evening with a look at markets. Major U.S. indexes ended the day mixed, with the Dow rising about 0.4 percent. But tech stocks struggled to shake off fears of an AI bubble. One of the day's biggest losers was Cerebris, the chipmaker that went public in May. Its shares fell almost 20 percent after the company warned it expects to keep operating at a loss, another reminder of the heavy costs of the AI build-out. The Nasdaq dropped 0.4 percent today after declining 4 percent over the past two days, and the S &P 500 fell 0.1 percent.

1:50Rebecca Picciotto:Meanwhile, oil prices dropped near pre-war levels. Brent crude futures fell 4.3 % to$73.74 a barrel. And Bitcoin dipped below 60 ,000 this afternoon, its lowest intraday level since earlier this month, when Bitcoin accumulation firm Strategy said it had unloaded a portion of its holdings. In earnings, U.S. memory chipmaker Micron reported more than$41 billion in revenue for its latest quarter, a more than four-fold increase from a year before and beating analyst expectations in virtually every financial metric watched closely by investors. The company forecasted that rapid growth will continue due to near-insatiable demand for its memory chips, a key component in AI technology.

2:30Rebecca Picciotto:But its stock has also been hit by investor worries about runaway tech valuations, high AI capital spending, and possible interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve. After getting hit hard yesterday by the broader tech sell-off, Micron shares were up nearly 14 % in after-hours trading. Separately, South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix plans to raise more than$29 billion through a U.S. listing. The deal would be one of the biggest share sales in company history, comparable to Saudi Aramco's 2019 IPO. The company is looking to tap foreign investors to fund its expansion plans as the AI boom fuels a rush for advanced chips.

3:06Rebecca Picciotto:SK Hynix expects trading to begin July 10, adding to a blockbuster year for equity raises. And new government data shows that U.S. new home sales fell in May to 580 ,000. That's down from 626 ,000 in April and worse than economists had expected. Today on Capitol Hill, President Trump had a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans about their legislative agenda. The face-off has been in the works for some time. Last week, President Trump threw a wrench in plans to confirm a new intelligence chief and renew a key spying law until Congress passes a contentious voter ID bill, the Save America Act. Ahead of today's lunch, Trump doubled down, canceling plans to sign a bipartisan housing bill into law, again, until Congress took action on that legislation.

3:52Rebecca Picciotto:For more on the meeting and where lawmakers go from here, reporter Marianne Levine joins me now from the Capitol. Marianne, what is in this Save America Act, and why is it so controversial among lawmakers? So the Save America Act is a top priority for President Trump. It would basically impose new voter eligibility rules, including proof of citizenship. And this is something that the president really wants Senate Republicans to pass. But there basically are not enough votes to get rid of the filibuster and pass this legislation. So it seems like based on some of the things that have happened just leading up to this meeting today, the vibe among Republicans was like pretty tense.

4:28Rebecca Picciotto:What was the outcome from this meeting? They really did not talk all that much about the Save America Act. And the president apparently got into a very contentious disagreement with Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict him during the president's second impeachment. He and Cassidy have had a very tense relationship. But it seems like a lot of the focus of the meeting really was not about this bill. It was really about the war in Iran. And where does Iran fit into this? The war in Iran has been a huge political question in the Senate, especially in terms of the impact the war has had on the midterms, in terms of gas prices and this broader question of affordability.

5:07The war in Iran was also very much on the president's mind because the Senate yesterday passed a war powers resolution that sought to restrict the president's authority on the war. The president was unhappy about that vote, and that informed some of his own anger today.

5:20Rebecca Picciotto:Where do lawmakers go from here? Will they be pushing Trump for more concessions? It's hard to say. I mean, the president is coming in in a pretty contentious moment in his relationship with Senate Republicans. This is, I think, an encapsulation of broader tension that's been growing between the president and the Senate Republican caucus that we've seen. And that's kind of spilling out in different ways, including this pressure to pass the SAVE Act. And so there's been this frustration of asking why the president is so focused on this bill that has no chance of passing. Marianne Levine joining me from the Capitol.

5:54Rebecca Picciotto:Thank you so much for the rundown. Thanks for having me. Coming up, how a new federal bill seeks to address the housing crisis. That's after the break. This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise.

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6:39Rebecca Picciotto:For months, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have gone back and forth over a bill to encourage new housing development. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act would be one of the biggest changes to federal housing policy in years. And this week, it finally passed through both chambers of Congress with overwhelming majorities and was set to be signed into law by President Trump today. Until, as we discussed earlier in the show, he abruptly canceled that plan. As the bill sits in limbo, some say its passage could speed up construction of much-needed new housing across the country. I'm joined now by Rebecca Pechotto, who covers the residential real estate market for The Journal.

7:17Rebecca Picciotto:Rebecca, walk us through what is in this legislation. So this final bill has more than 50 provisions aimed at making it easier to build more housing, and one provision aimed at trying to keep private equity out of the housing market. It's been nearly a year of back and forth, but what the two chambers have settled on has all of the same bills that the House passed in May. But it adds back some of the earlier Senate provisions that the House had removed. So, for example, this Build Now Act, which is a provision that essentially ties federal grant funding that a city gets to the amount of housing they produce.

7:55So the more housing a city produces, the more grant funding they could be eligible for. This is one of the kind of carrot and stick approaches that the two chambers settled on to try to incentivize local governments to build more.

8:10Rebecca Picciotto:Let's go back to the beginning with these bills. Who introduced the bill? What was the intention behind it? The first version of this bill came out in August 2025. It was introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott, a Democrat and a Republican. At that time, it really was just a pretty uncontroversial package of a bunch of small housing bills that everyone largely agreed was a step in the right direction. You know, no one bill in the package was going to do enough to move the needle. But together, it was seen as Congress's largest move on housing in decades. And it had this massive bipartisan support.

8:50It included everything from speeding up permitting processes, cutting red tape around environmental reviews, making it easier to build manufactured housing, encouraging local municipalities to ease their zoning laws. A bunch of small tweaks that, in tandem, are seen as crucial to increase housing supply. If you ask real estate leaders, the federal government has a very limited ability to actually enact real change. What housing gets built where is often determined on the local level. But the sort of symbol that the federal government was moving towards encouraging more housing supply, that was seen as enough to have the momentum and support to pass it.

9:34Rebecca Picciotto:Okay, so these two lawmakers introduce it. It's bipartisan. Then what happens? When Trump, at the beginning of this year, announced his executive order to ban Wall Street housing investors, he demanded that Congress codify that ban into law. And the White House saw the Senate's road to housing bill as a very convenient vehicle to get that done. And now this ban has created this back and forth that I don't think lawmakers had initially intended when they first introduced the bill. So for those of us who haven't been following the bill up to this point, what is the investor ban and why is this something that President Trump cares about?

10:11Basically, Trump wants to forbid large institutional investors from buying up single family homes and essentially turning them into investments, renting them out, etc. His theory is that there are these large Wall Street companies that are basically stealing the housing supply from American families who otherwise would have been able to pursue the American dream of home ownership. So the idea is to eliminate these behemoth investors from competing with individual investors who can't pay all cash or offer the higher bids that these firms can. It's been controversial because there's this general sense that this is a largely political move and economists will maintain that the amount of housing that Wall Street investors actually own is relatively low single digits across the country that is felt differently in different places.

11:07You know, Phoenix, Atlanta, you can have investor owned housing stock up to like 20%. So this pulled really well, but investors are often kind of an important financing avenue for home builders to offload surplus housing stock. It allows them to build more homes. The primary worry of the real estate industry was that this investor ban would send a signal to the lenders and financing partners that they typically go to that the government is trying to suppress the number of single -family rentals that exist in America.

11:42Rebecca Picciotto:So the real estate industry has been lobbying around this bill. They've had concerns about it. Where does the industry stand on it now? The bill is generally something that the real estate industry likes. You know, it sends a message to local leaders that you want to streamline regulations and make it easier to build. So the real estate industry broadly sees this bill as a victory. The investor ban piece is sort of a more sour pill to swallow. But at this point, I think they've negotiated down to a point where they feel OK. That was residential real estate reporter Rebecca Picciotto. For more from her and on housing legislation, check out today's episode of Your Money Briefing.

12:22Rebecca Picciotto:Tomorrow, our housing series continues on the PM episode of What's News, looking at what happens when people decide that homeownership is a part of the American dream that's no longer for them. We'll be talking about the renter revolution. If you have any questions about that, affordability, or the legislation we discussed today, then send us a voice memo to wnpod at wsj.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. Or if you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. We'll be looking to answer your most burning questions with journal real estate editor Craig Carman at the end of the week.

12:59Rebecca Picciotto:And that's what's news for this Wednesday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bancey and Danny Lewis with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Alex Osalov for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

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