21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

What this does

This law is a housing package spanning twelve titles. It reauthorizes the HOME Investment Partnerships program and rewrites how housing qualifies for it, raising the home-ownership purchase-price ceiling from 95 to 110 percent and extending eligibility to families earning up to 100 percent of area median income. It reforms federal housing counseling programs. It directs HUD to publish model code guidelines for single-stair, point-access block residential buildings up to six stories. It exempts USDA rural housing built on infill sites from environmental study requirements. It creates pilot programs, including an FHA small-dollar mortgage pilot for loans of $100,000 or less, a whole-home repairs pilot, a temperature-sensor pilot, and an escrow pilot that shields a tenant's rising earnings from rent increases. It raises FHA multifamily mortgage loan limits and the loan caps for manufactured-home and property-improvement financing. It converts the Rental Assistance Demonstration into a permanent program and raises its unit cap from 455,000 to 555,000. It creates competitive grants tied to local housing supply growth, including a $200,000,000-per-year Innovation Fund for fiscal years 2027 through 2031, and adjusts Community Development Block Grant allocations to reward jurisdictions that build more housing and cut those that build less. It lets manufactured homes be built without a permanent chassis and requires states to treat them on par with chassis-built homes or prohibit their sale. It bars large institutional investors that control 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional single-family homes, subject to broad exceptions, with civil penalties up to $1,000,000 or three times the purchase price. It prohibits the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency. It relaxes several bank and credit-union rules, including raising the asset threshold for on-site supervisory testing from $3,000,000,000 to $6,000,000,000. It authorizes no additional appropriations.