In an aerial view, single-family homes are seen in Thousand Oaks, California, on April 19, 2025. —Kevin Carter—Getty ImagesCongress is set to pass a sweeping bipartisan housing bill that could help boost the U.S. housing supply and lower costs for millions of renters and buyers across the country.The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by a vote of 85-5 on Monday. It now heads to the House, which could send it to President Donald Trump’s desk as soon as this week.Congressional leaders released a bicameral compromise version of the bill last week after earlier iterations passed the Senate in March and the House in May, winning overwhelming support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in each chamber. “This is a very rare occurrence to have successive bipartisan votes across both chambers on versions of this bill, and it finally seems to be reaching the finish line,” Francis Torres, housing and infrastructure director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, tells TIME. “This bill is the most serious that Congress has gotten about housing reforms in a generation.”The legislation, which has been led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tim Scott of South Carolina in the Senate and Reps. Maxine Waters of California and French Hill of Arkansas in the House, is poised to become the largest housing package signed into law in decades. Among a host of over 50 provisions, it seeks to remove barriers to building homes, lower housing costs, and shift greater control over housing to the local level.“This bill reflects years of work and priorities from the White House, Senate, and House to build a housing affordability package that puts families first, increases supply, expands access to affordable housing, and addresses the housing crisis,” Scott and Warren said in a joint statement after the Senate passed the legislation. “Today’s bipartisan vote is an important step toward addressing America’s housing affordability crisis and giving families across this country a fair shot at the American Dream.”Hill said in a statement following the Senate’s passage that he looks “forward to the House moving quickly to advance this bill to President Trump’s desk.”Here’s what to know about the bill and how it could impact the U.S. housing market. What’s in the bill?One of the bill’s biggest goals is to increase the U.S. housing supply, which it seeks to do through a variety of different approaches.For one, the bill would streamline environmental reviews in an effort to speed the process of constructing homes. It would also mandate that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offer guidance on how communities could best reform zoning and land-use policies to reduce barriers to housing development. “This bill would just provide a lot of guidelines around best practices, and specifically pattern books for how local jurisdictions can reduce design and approval costs, other costly red tape processes for housing developers, particularly small developers,” Torres says. Another provision of the bill would expand the definition of “manufactured housing”—a change that Torres says would “unlock” a segment of the housing market by making it cheaper and easier to mass-produce such homes, which are built entirely in factories before being transported to their sites. Still other portions of the bill would provide various grants and loans aimed at supporting the development of new housing or the improvement of already existing properties, including rebuilding aging homes and converting vacant buildings into housing. Additionally, it increases certain banks’ Public Welfare Investment cap, allowing them to invest more in low-income and affordable housing communities. Beyond seeking to bolster supply, the legislation also aims to help more Americans rent and buy homes.For instance, It would create a program aimed at making small-dollar mortgages, which help buyers obtain lower-cost homes, more accessible. It would additionally seek to help veterans access potential housing opportunities.In perhaps the most controversial of the various changes it would make, the bill would also restrict the number of single-family homes large, institutional investors can own and require them to report how many such properties they control, with the goal of promoting homeownership opportunities for American families rather than corporations. How will it impact the housing market?Experts tell TIME that they expect the bill to have a positive impact on both the supply and cost of housing—but that it will take time for its effects to be felt.“Is this bill going to lead to an increase in housing supply and make it easier for developers to build more housing? The answer is yes,” Torres says.But he stresses that “the vast majority of the provisions of this bill” will be felt more in the longer term, with the exception of a few provisions, such as those related to manufactured housing and loan limits.Yonah Freemark, a housing researcher at the Urban Institute, calls the legislation “a step forward,” saying that he believes it will help increase the supply of homes and move toward making housing in the U.S. more affordable.Similarly to Torres, however, he says that the improvements the bill will lead to in the rate of construction will be “incremental.”"I think that over the medium to long term, the legislation has the potential to reduce housing prices, but not over the short term … the next two years,” he tells TIME.He also cautions that the legislation will not altogether fix the significant issues that plague the American housing market."This legislation is impressive and shows that Congress does have an interest in housing, but the idea that this legislation will resolve Americans' housing affordability problems is over-promising,” he says. "We can't rely on any individual bill to fundamentally change the housing market, because the high housing costs that folks are experiencing right now are a combination of housing prices themselves, which have not really come down, and high mortgage interest rates, as well as inadequate growth in personal income––and those fundamentals are not going to change with this legislation."Sharon Wilson Géno, the president of the National Multifamily Housing Council, says that the bill’s impacts on affordability will first be felt by lower-income Americans.“Our housing-affordability challenges are the greatest, and significantly much more so at that very low income end of the spectrum,” she says, adding that “the federal government actually has most control and most opportunity at that part of the housing market.” She points When it comes to the restrictions the bill places on large investors, meanwhile, both Torres and Géno say that they will do little to improve housing affordability.Torres tells TIME that such investors make up only “a small sliver” of the housing market. “Ultimately, if we're talking about a nationwide housing affordability crisis, we got to think about the things that are driving housing costs all over the place, all over the country, and at the root of that is just a under supply of homes, especially in places that people want to live in,” he says. Géno, who similarly describes institutional investments in the single-family market as "miniscule,” asserts that big investors provide a great benefit to the overall housing market. “I hope that moving forward we can get out of this rhetoric around, ‘oh, it's institutional investment that's the problem.’ We need everybody at the table,” she says. “Housing costs money. We need housing in the United States. We need investors to invest in housing.”