Airdate: Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 9AM
A landmark bipartisan federal housing bill became law this weekend. The package includes 56 initiatives, regulatory tweaks and reforms designed to improve housing affordability nationwide — and local housing policy experts say it could have a material impact on the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis. We’ll learn more about the local impacts.
Guests:
- Ben Metcalf, Terner Center of Housing Innovation managing director, University of California, Berkeley; former director of California Department of Housing and Community Development
- Adhiti Bandlamudi, housing reporting, KQED
- Sam Moss, executive director, Mission Housing Development Corporation in San Francisco
This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.
It’s not as if the state of California has done nothing to try to address our housing crisis. Many bills have made their way through the state legislature. In fact, I counted more than 25 in the last decade. But building houses takes time, and, well, housing production on a statewide basis has not really gone up.
Tucked inside this somewhat bad news, locally there’s actually worse news. The Bay Area’s housing production has declined very substantially from a 2018 peak. The standard analysis of the situation is simply that higher interest rates, rising construction costs, and worries about our downtown cores swamp the legislative changes happening in Sacramento.
Still, sheesh.
In that context, can this new federal bill help? Let’s ask some people.
We’re joined first this morning by Adhiti Bandlamudi, who is a housing reporter at KQED. Welcome.
Adhiti Bandlamudi: Thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Ben Metcalf, managing director with the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. He’s the former director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Hi.
Ben Metcalf: It’s a pleasure to be on.
Alexis Madrigal: So, Ben, your organization called this bill the most significant housing legislation in a generation. Why is that? And is it also just because we haven’t done anything for a generation, or is it actually a big deal?
Ben Metcalf: Yeah. Well, I think both are true. I mean, Congress has not been doing a good job of just basic legislating over the last couple of decades on any topic, right? It’s been a lot of partisan gridlock.
And I think, depending on how you count it, it’s really been a few decades, maybe arguably since 1990, that Congress actually passed a comprehensive set of policy changes that received the kind of support and comprehensiveness that it did here.
So that is one answer: it’s been a long time. But the other answer is, I think, in part because it’s been so long, what we’ve seen is a whole bunch of stuff that’s been backed up in the legislative pipeline finally seeing daylight. And although we don’t really have any one silver bullet, we have 45 different sections of this legislation that each tackle a different piece in a reasonably significant way. So if you take all those 45 pieces together, then I think you get to something that is pretty meaningful.
Alexis Madrigal: Hmm. Adhiti, you’ve been looking at the application of the bill to California’s housing crisis. What would you say people have told you are the most significant provisions of the bill?
Adhiti Bandlamudi: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. As I was looking at the provisions in the bill and talking to folks about it, some of the people I spoke to were saying that it’s actually inspired somewhat by legislation that California has already passed.
Last year, Governor Newsom signed a bunch of legislation that streamlines environmental reviews. In Congress’s bill package, you see similar reforms that streamline NEPA reviews. That’s kind of the national, or federal, version of CEQA for certain projects.
You see other things when it comes to pre-approved designs. I think one element of this package that seems to be generating a lot of excitement, especially for local legislators, is manufactured housing, like factory-built housing. The federal package included quite a few pieces of legislation to boost that industry along, and some of the folks I talked to said it could work well in tandem with some of the things that the California Legislature is looking at this year.
Alexis Madrigal: You know, Ben, at the highest level, this is bipartisan legislation, like you said. And of course, that means that everyone sort of got on board — conservatives and more liberal folks.
In part, though, isn’t that because a lot of what’s in here is sort of tweaks to the market, right? I mean, these aren’t really massive changes in the way that we think about housing production in the U.S., right? This is just trying to get what feels like a market that’s under-delivering to work a little better.
Ben Metcalf: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, I think one way to think about this is that the only things that made it into this bill were the things that didn’t get screened out. And the things that got screened out were usually really big, really controversial, or really partisan.
So, definitionally, the only things that could survive in this process and stay in this bill had to have bipartisan support. They had to be essentially the consensus of both minority and majority leadership in both chambers.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, what did that leave on the table? What’s a big idea that could have been in here but didn’t make it?
Ben Metcalf: Well, first of all, I want to say there’s no new funding. And so I think one of the big concerns is just what’s happening with federal funding for housing.
Although we see some tee-ups for funding to follow later, which is important — actually quite important — what we don’t see in here is anything that would come through the appropriations process. And we don’t really see any big new programs.
What really is happening here is that Congress is looking at the existing suite of tools that it already has and figuring out how to make them work better, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively.
Alexis Madrigal: You know, there is — people now are familiar with the term YIMBY, right? “Yes, in my backyard.” These are people who’ve been calling for building more homes, building more housing. And some people are saying this bill out of Congress is sort of a victory for that.
Adhiti Bandlamudi: I think that’s fair. I mean, I think this bill package includes a lot of carrots for cities and municipalities that want to build housing and that are already taking steps to do that.
I think on the flip side of that, some of the folks I talked to said this bill package doesn’t have a lot of sticks. It doesn’t have mechanisms that hold cities and counties accountable if they aren’t building housing.
So I think it’s very YIMBY-focused, but not necessarily on the other side of that.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah.
We’re talking about the massive bipartisan federal housing bill that became law on Saturday. We’ve got Adhiti Bandlamudi, housing reporter here at KQED. We’ve also got Ben Metcalf, managing director with the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. He previously worked in government as the director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
We’d love to hear from you if you have questions about this bill, you’re interested in specific provisions, or things that it might or might not do.
How do you think local leaders should work to address our housing affordability crisis here?
Give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media — Bluesky, Instagram, Discord, etc. We’re KQED Forum there.
You know, Ben, when the big climate bill was passed — the Inflation Reduction Act, back in the Biden administration — people tried to parcel out, like, “Okay, here’s where the carbon reductions are going to come from. This percentage comes from this, this percentage comes from this.” They did this with all the provisions of that similar kind of omnibus bill.
Can that be done with a bill like this, where you could say, “Okay, this is going to add this many units. This is going to add that many units,” or not?
Ben Metcalf: Oh, that would be hard. I don’t think anybody’s going to try and do that, simply because it’s got, as I said, 45 different sections of law that are each doing pretty weedy, specific things.
There’s just a lot of conjecture, also. I think it’s important to acknowledge that just because Congress passes a bill doesn’t mean something happens tomorrow.
One of my colleagues at the Turner Center, Ernst Reiter, did an analysis that identified 124 follow-on actions that federal agencies will now need to do to implement the bill. It’s not actually self-implementing. It’s going to take the administrative state, mostly HUD, to come up with the regulations, the guidelines, and the programs to actually execute on that.
So I think there are also just a lot of TBDs on what the Trump administration actually does, how seriously they take this, and how expansively they view the charge from Congress as to how impactful it will be, and then how long it will take for all that stuff to get fully implemented.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, because President Trump didn’t sign this bill — sort of as a protest, I suppose — and HUD itself was gutted by DOGE during this administration.
Adhiti Bandlamudi: Yeah. I mean, that’s a really interesting wrinkle of this. Even though President Trump had talked a lot about this on the campaign trail and had talked about housing a little bit when he entered office, this really hasn’t been something that he has full-throatedly stood behind.
He did not sign the legislation when it passed Congress.
It is kind of interesting because, earlier this spring, when Congress was starting to negotiate consolidating — because it was originally two bills. There was a House version and a Senate version, and they consolidated it into one mega-package. When those negotiations were happening, Trump announced two executive orders that were trying to approach supply and demand.
One was to remove regulatory barriers, like green building mandates and permitting requirements, and the other loosened mortgage lending regulations for community banks.
But he was kind of doing his own thing. And that is really interesting when you think about this idea that this bill was, I think, for some Republican lawmakers, supposed to be kind of a victory.
Alexis Madrigal: You know, Ben, one of the things that I’m curious about: all these streamlining measures and legislative changes have been made over this last decade, both in California and now in this bill nationally.
If interest rates were to drop, is the expectation that there would be a little bit of an unprecedented boom in housing production because those macroeconomic constraints would go away and the path has been cleared through all these legislative efforts?
Ben Metcalf: I think so. I mean, unfortunately, at this point it’s not just interest rates, right? There are also other things that have complicated the economics of building, even if you have all the policy in place.
I’d point in particular to construction costs and also the fees that municipalities are charging in places like California. Both of those have unfortunately been going up at rates faster than inflation. Materials prices, labor costs, and the impact fees developers now are up against have all grown quite a bit too.
Yes, if you could get the interest rate down, it would help a lot. Unfortunately, there’s also another cost issue that has crept up on the marketplace over the last five or ten years that will continue to be a drag.
Some of this — Adhiti mentioned the manufactured housing language in here — is actually very responsive to the cost issue. So if we can really see the manufactured housing, factory-built sector get to scale, if this can help with that, if you could do that, plus you could get interest rates down, plus maybe a little Prop. 13 reform, then you’re out of the way. Now we’re talking, and we’re good.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the massive bipartisan federal housing bill that became law on Saturday with Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Turner Center for Housing Innovation, and, of course, our own Adhiti Bandlamudi, housing reporter here at KQED.
We’re going to get to more of your questions about the bill after the break. 866-733-6786, or forum@kqed.org.
I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.