How housing affordability can be achieved at the state and local level

There’s one word on everyone’s mind in 2026: affordability. And when speaking about affordability, it’s hard not to mention housing. More than eight in 10 Americans say housing affordability is a problem where they live. I’ve seen this at home in Montana. Since the pandemic, prices have jumped more than 66 percent, pushing homeownership even further out of reach for many working families. This isn’t just happening in Montana. In urban, suburban and rural communities across the country, families are unable to compete for housing. It should not be this difficult to find an affordable place to live. Federal lawmakers made significant strides to reverse this trend, passing the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing package aimed at expanding supply, modernizing federal housing programs, and addressing the frustration families feel across the country. The law is not perfect, but it’s a positive step in the right direction. Notably, the law caps the number of single-family homes that Wall Street landlords can purchase without impacting professional housing providers. Families looking for a home should not be pushed aside by Wall Street. One of the intriguing features of the final bill is that it threaded the policy needle by capping Wall Street purchases, while ensuring that professional housing providers could still invest in refurbishing existing homes and building new homes to rent, thereby increasing supply and lowering home prices. A previous version of the bil…