Housing Policy

A Reprieve for Build-To-Rent

The House passes a housing bill that protects build-to-rent development while still cracking down on large investors.

Christian Britschgi | 5.26.2026 5:35 PM

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Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the latest edition of Rent Free. This week's slightly abbreviated post-Memorial Day issue includes a breakdown of the latest version of the housing bill passed by the House last week.

We also have an item on how, contra some recent headlines, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not offering any major exceptions to his coming rent freeze.

House Housing Bill Protects Build-To-Rent

A bipartisan housing supply bill that has been in the works since the summer of last year passed the House last week, minus a controversial requirement that large investors sell off their holdings of build-to-rent single-family homes to individual owner-occupiers.  

The latest House version of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed 396–13 on Wednesday, still bans large investors from purchasing existing single-family homes.  

Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.

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But these investors would no longer be required to sell off their holdings of purpose-built single-family rental communities, which the Senate's version of the bill would have forced them to do. 

Housing supply advocates, who are generally supportive of the ROAD to Housing Act's grab bag of policies aimed at increasing home construction, have praised the removal of the forced dispossession requirement for build-to-rent housing. 

"Just by removing that dispossession requirement changes the bill from something that has some positives for housing supply and one big negative into something that is unambiguously good for housing supply," says Will Poff-Webster, a housing policy expert at the Institute for Progress.  

Build-to-rent single-family communities are often owned by large investors, built on a single, legal parcel of land around shared amenities, and intended as a long-term "hold" investment. In recent years, build-to-rent housing has accounted for as much as 10 percent of new single-family home construction. 

Requiring owners of these communities to break them up and sell them off to individual owners thus........

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