My wife and I recently moved into a charming Victorian house built in 1879, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. Despite nearly a century and a half of wear, it remains a beautiful home. But living in it has taught me an important lesson: there’s a world of difference between a house that looks sound and one that is structurally sound.

The floors slope noticeably from room to room. Windows stick on humid days. Doors don’t always close quite right. None of these problems is catastrophic. They are reminders that beneath the attractive exterior, a house this old carries structural issues that no amount of fresh paint can conceal.

I’m reminded of that distinction between cosmetic repairs and structural ones as I think about Congress’s recently enacted bipartisan housing law.

It represents a genuine effort to address one of America’s most pressing economic challenges, and lawmakers deserve credit for working across party lines. It also couldn’t have come at a better time. America’s housing affordability crisis has reached historic proportions.

According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, a record 43.5 million households spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in 2024, while 21.6 million spent more than half their income simply to keep a roof over their heads. The burden reaches well into the middle class: 49 percent of renters earning between $45,000 and $75,000 a year were cost-burdened. Meanwhile, the median single-family home price reached five times the median household income in 2024, compared with roughly three times income during much of the 1990s.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act attacks the problem from several directions. It seeks to streamline some reviews and permitting, encourages local governments to reconsider barriers to new housing, expands support for manufactured and modular housing and housing finance, and restricts additional single-family-home purchases by large institutional investors. These aren’t trivial changes. Some could make it easier and cheaper to build housing.

But zoning illustrates the limits of even well-intentioned federal action. Congress can encourage communities to permit duplexes, apartments, accessory dwelling units, and greater density, but most land-use decisions remain state and local responsibilities. Indeed, the new law itself prevents federal officials from using its zoning provisions to preempt local zoning or land-use policy. Washington can provide incentives. It cannot simply rewrite thousands of local zoning codes.

The law therefore improves pieces of the system without fundamentally restructuring it. The nation’s housing system is decentralized by design, while the housing shortage has become a national problem. The result is a familiar pattern in American policymaking: filling in the visible cracks while leaving the foundation largely untouched.

The Foundation Is Still Cracking

The housing affordability crisis wasn’t created overnight, nor was it caused by a single policy. It is the product of decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning, cumbersome approval processes, rising construction costs, shortages of skilled labor, and persistent local opposition to higher-density development.

Freddie Mac estimates that the United States remains 3.7 million housing units short of what is needed to meet long-term demand. Its researchers identify inadequate supply as a root cause of deteriorating affordability: when too few homes are available, buyers and renters bid up the price of those that are.

Consider, for example, a middle-class couple in Seattle. She is a public school teacher; he is an EMT. Together, they earn a solid, steady income and have done everything previous generations were told to do: work hard, save diligently, and plan for the future. Yet homeownership remains beyond their reach as housing prices have climbed faster than their savings and mortgage rates have remained high.

Their predicament is hardly unusual. The National Association of Realtors reported in 2025 that first-time buyers accounted for just 21 percent of home purchases, the lowest share since it began keeping records in 1981. The median first-time buyer was 40 years old, another record.

These are the foundation problems. No single federal law, however well intentioned, can solve them. Yet unless they are confronted, broadly affordable housing will remain out of reach for millions of Americans.

Why Congress Patches Instead of Rebuilds

The structural problems in housing are politically difficult precisely because they involve trade-offs. Local zoning reform can mean denser neighborhoods, smaller lots, more apartments, and changes that existing homeowners may resist. Faster permitting can reduce opportunities for public input. Expanding supply can provoke opposition from residents concerned about congestion or changes in neighborhood character.

Congress therefore gravitates toward measures that are easier to enact and defend. Incremental reforms can attract bipartisan support while avoiding direct confrontation with organized local interests. They allow lawmakers to claim progress without forcing them to absorb all the political costs of structural change.

But congressional timidity is only part of the explanation. Federalism matters. Some of the most consequential decisions affecting housing supply are simply not Washington’s to make. That does not absolve Congress of responsibility. It means that repairing the foundation requires coordinated action from federal, state, and local governments.

Housing is hardly unique in this respect. It exposes a recurring weakness of American policymaking: large national problems often require action across a fragmented political system that is much better at dividing authority than coordinating it.

Fixing the Foundation

Living in an old house has taught me that there is nothing wrong with making modest repairs. Sometimes a patched wall or repaired window is exactly what is needed. But eventually, if the foundation is shifting, someone has to do the harder work.

Congress’s new housing law may be a useful repair, and its bipartisan passage is certainly preferable to the paralysis we have come to expect from Washington. But simply passing a law is a remarkably low standard for success. Americans struggling to buy or rent a home don’t need another bipartisan victory lap. They need policies equal to the scale of the problem.

Filling the cracks may make the house look better. It won’t keep the foundation from shifting.

Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.