At a Tuesday morning meeting of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development, Lawrence “Lars” Powell said the quiet part out loud.
“The heavy lift that’s left to do is for policymakers,” the executive director of the Center for Insurance and Research at the University of Alabama said of his organization’s efforts to address home insurance costs. “We need to create effective incentives for loss mitigation.”
As a government shutdown that commenced on Oct. 1 drags into its fourth week and the U.S. House of Representatives remains indefinitely recessed, Senate policymakers remain committed to plugging their signature housing bill despite the shutdown’s legislative halt.
The Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act of 2025, amended to the omnibus National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2026, awaits reconciliation with the House version of the NDAA, which does not include the ROAD Act.
However, the ROAD Act passed the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with a unanimous 24-0 vote in July, reflecting the lack of housing access and affordability challenges facing homeowners and renters in voting districts nationwide.
“In 93% of counties, a minimum wage worker can’t afford to rent a one-bedroom place to live,” said Tina Smith, D-Minn., ranking member of the Housing, Transportation and Community Development committee, in her opening statement.
Supporting effective regulation
Powell was called to testify on the success of a new building standard in Alabama that’s designed to protect against severe weather, reducing the cost of insurance premiums and the prevalence of wind-related roofing insurance claims. Developed by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, the FORTIFIED standard offers savings to buyers at little additional cost to builders.
“We don’t really have an insurance problem,” said Powell, noting the way insurance works. When risk rises, premiums are supposed to rise, too. “Risk has grown in recent decades and we’ve built a lot of flimsy, expensive houses in dangerous places.”
Research by the Center for Risk and Insurance Research after Hurricane Sally hit the Alabama coast in September 2020 found losses for conventional houses doubled losses for the 17,000 FORTIFIED-certified houses built then. More than 20% of homes in Alabama’s coastal Mobile and Baldwin counties have now been built or retrofitted FORTIFIED.
Alabama requires insurers to offer to replace a conventional roof with a FORTIFIED roof if the roof damage is covered. Powell said this demonstrates how effective regulation can help physical and financial resilience accrue to the owners and future owners of aging U.S. housing stock, lowering costs for borrowers and claims frequency for insurers while shielding the system.
“What we really have is where-and-how-you-build-your-house problems,” he said. “The weird part to me is we haven’t built this way in the last 20 or 40 years.”
In April, however, the Trump administration cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. BRIC was developed in 2018 during the first Trump administration and launched in 2020 on a bipartisan basis to help fund pre-disaster loss mitigation.
In July, 20 states — led by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown — filed a lawsuit over the termination of BRIC, which had resulted in the revoking of billions of dollars of congressionally approved funding, including the freezing of active disbursements. A temporary injunction in mid-August barred the Trump administration from spending BRIC dollars for non-BRIC purposes as the case proceeds.
Noting the impact of the withdrawn funding on his own constituents, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., asked Powell whether programs like BRIC help to scale initiatives like Alabama’s FORTIFIED building standard.
“Having funds like that makes good economic sense,” Powell explained. “It makes sense for the budget and everything else to put these resources toward pre-loss mitigation. We were excited about ways to use that.”
Honoring appropriated funds
The ROAD Act represents 315 pages of smaller, more targeted proposals for improving housing supply and investment across a range of sectors in housing and housing finance. The impetus for Tuesday’s session was highlighting how various bipartisan measures contained in the ROAD Act help to scale state and local solutions.
The government shutdown provides uncomfortable context for stumping bipartisan legislation, though, given Democrats’ contention that the Trump administration — and by extension Republican lawmakers — will not honor any funding packages approved by Congress. All federal operations face close White House scrutiny to ensure they align with Trump administration priorities.
BRIC funding promised to deliver urgent infrastructure upgrades for at-risk communities in every fold of the political map. Not only was the program terminated, but funds actively being drawn down were frozen.
Last week’s gutting of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) Fund by the White House Office of Management and Budget seeks to rescind additional community lending funds approved for spending on a bipartisan basis.
Numerous proposals in the ROAD Act advance or rely on the preservation and expansion of CDFI funding from the Treasury. The Scaling Community Lenders Act of 2023, co-sponsored by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, specifically authorizes new resources to activate and fund the CDFI liquidity enhancement program — Section 113 of the bipartisan Riegle Act of 1994 — which first established CDFIs.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D.-Nev., touted the Affordable Housing Bond Enhancement Act she introduced with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R.-La. That proposal increases thresholds for small-dollar loan amounts and tax credits used for home repairs and renovations, whether installing disaster-mitigation or energy upgrades, or adding an accessibility ramp.
The former commissioner of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency from 2011 to 2019, Mary Tingerthal, drew attention in her testimony to ROAD Act reforms directing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to perform a quality and durability test on modular homes to dispel modular misconceptions.
Tingerthal said “enduring problems of modular acceptance” could be eliminated with a simple yet concerted effort by regulators to engage industry stakeholders. The National Association of Home Builders she called an “ally” to be brought to the table. Housing developers and general contractors she called least informed about modular construction’s potential as an affordable housing solution.
Selling bipartisan reforms
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., chair of the Housing, Transportation and Community Development subcommittee that met Tuesday, laid out the stakes for consumers nationwide in her introductory remarks, highlighting the business case for supporting ROAD Act reforms.
“More than three-quarters of U.S. households can’t afford to buy a median-priced home,” she explained. “If there’s no place to live, it’s much harder to attract business and talent.”
Challenges Britt cited include a 4.7-million-unit housing supply shortage and the rising average age of first-time homebuyers, now in its late 30s. She also cited regulatory costs that account for 24% of the price of a new single-family home and 40% of a new multifamily development.
Asked by Britt to explain how the ROAD Act achieves deregulation, the chair of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, Dennis Shea, testified that three regulatory principles organize the ROAD Act’s broad ambitions: the carrot, the stick and best practices.
As a carrot, the Build More Housing Near Transit Act incentivizes localities to develop housing near federally funded transit infrastructure. As a stick, Shea said, the Build Now Act ties Community Development Block Grant funding to some communities’ housing production, with bonuses for accelerated delivery and reductions for lagging grantees.
Meanwhile, the Housing Supply Frameworks Act directs HUD to publish guidelines and best practices to help standardize state and local land use policies, an important step toward aligning the federal government’s deregulatory push with state-specific zoning and development ordinances.
All three proposals in the ROAD Act carry bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, with reconciliation between the chambers’ separate NDAAs for 2026 looming.
The federal government has a role to play, Britt stated, in helping communities remove red tape and encouraging localities to loosen regulations. On Jan. 31, President Donald Trump signed the executive order, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” which called for federal agencies to identify 10 regulations to cut for any one regulation they propose to add.
Ensuring each marble of the ROAD Act survives reconciliation and then White House rescissions will be one test facing lawmakers when lawmaking resumes.
