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Fortune
Fortune
Business
Shawn Tully

The ROAD Act passed by the Senate aims to expand America's housing supply. It's likely to shrink it instead

Senator Elizabeth Warren (Credit: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg—Getty Images)

Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a margin seldom seen for an important piece of legislation, 89 to 10. The measure, primarily written by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her staff, targets the single-family home rental industry as a major cause of America’s painful housing shortage.

The idea motivating the bill: These enterprises are either buying or building, then renting out for profit, houses that would otherwise get listed for sale, shrinking the supply on the market and hence raising prices and limiting shoppers’ choices for the ranches, colonials or condos available in the neighborhoods where they’d like to live. That idea has broad bipartisan support: President Trump has said he supports keeping investors out of the single-family home market, and issued an executive order to that effect in January.

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