A sweeping federal housing law is taking effect this week, and it is doing so in a strange way: without the president's signature.
How a bill becomes law without a signature
The measure, known as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, cleared Congress with lopsided bipartisan support. President Trump chose not to sign it, but he also did not veto it, and under the Constitution a bill becomes law after 10 days (excluding Sundays) if the president takes no action while Congress is in session, CalMatters reported. The result is a major law enacted by default.
Trump's reason was tactical, not a rejection of housing policy. He held back his signature to press Senate Republicans to move on a separate voter-identification bill that had stalled, CalMatters reported. The housing bill's support in Congress was broad enough that his non-signature made no difference to the outcome; by multiple accounts it passed the Senate and House by overwhelming margins.
What the law does
Rather than one grand overhaul, the law is a bundle of changes aimed at getting more housing built. It raises the cap on the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, a tool public housing authorities use to convert and preserve units, by 100,000 conversions, CalMatters reported. It also eases certain construction rules, cutting outdated requirements on manufactured housing and loosening restrictions that had limited some apartment designs, moves supporters say should make building cheaper and faster.
The California angle
For California, which has among the nation's highest housing costs, the law is a double-edged deal. The bigger Rental Assistance Demonstration cap directly addresses a bottleneck that housing authorities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have run into for years, a clear gain.
But there is a catch aimed at high-cost cities that do not build enough. Places like Los Angeles and San Francisco face a 10 percent cut to their Community Development Block Grant funding if they keep under-building, with those dollars redirected toward communities that add housing faster, CalMatters reported. The law also restricts large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes, though CalMatters noted that provision is likely to have limited effect in California, where big corporate buyers are not a major force in the market.
The bottom line
The ROAD Act will not fix California's housing shortage on its own; its provisions are, by design, incremental. But it hands the state new tools to preserve and build housing while nudging its most expensive cities to permit more of it. That it arrives on the books without a presidential signature is a reminder that, when a congressional majority is lopsided enough, even a reluctant president cannot stand in the way.
