With over twenty years of experience helping people secure home loans, I strongly support mortgage financing solutions. I've seen firsthand how programs assisting first-time buyers and providing down payment help can open doors to homeownership. I advocate for streamlining the mortgage process, increasing fair access to loans, and eliminating roadblocks that stop creditworthy people from buying homes. But after years in this field, I've come up against a hard truth that no loan program can change: no amount of credit can create a house that doesn't exist.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11, 2026. It’s a massive piece of housing legislation containing 59 sections across 12 different titles. There is a lot in it: small-dollar mortgages, manufactured housing, VA lending, institutional investors, affordable housing programs, environmental review, rural housing, appraisals, and local development incentives.
Some of these changes are useful. Some could eventually make a meaningful difference. But after looking more closely at the law and some of the analysis surrounding it, I keep coming back to a distinction that I think gets lost in almost every housing affordability debate.
We actually have two affordability problems
We talk about “housing affordability” as though it is one problem. It isn’t. There is borrower affordability, and there is housing affordability. They overlap, but they require very different solutions.
Borrower affordability asks questions like:
Can someone qualify for the mortgage?
Do they have enough money for the down payment?
Can we lower the monthly payment?
Can we find a better mortgage program?
Can down-payment assistance bridge the gap?
Can we improve their credit or restructure debt?
Those are financing problems, and they are exactly the kinds of problems good mortgage professionals should be solving every day.
Housing affordability asks something different: Why are there not enough homes where people want to live at prices they can afford?
That’s primarily a supply problem.
Ten buyers. Five houses.
Strip away all the policy language and think about a simple housing market. Imagine 10 qualified buyers want to purchase homes. There are five homes available. We introduce a fantastic new financing program, and suddenly all 10 buyers can afford another $30,000.
That’s great for those buyers individually. But how many houses exist now? Still five.
We increased everyone’s ability to compete for the existing inventory. We did not create additional inventory. One family wins the house. Another family still doesn’t have one. And if purchasing power rises faster than supply, some of that additional buying power can ultimately show up in higher prices.
This doesn’t mean financing assistance is bad. It means financing assistance and housing production solve different problems.
Small-dollar mortgages show the difference perfectly
One provision in the new housing law focuses attention on small-dollar mortgages. This is a legitimate problem that people outside the mortgage industry often don’t understand: a smaller mortgage does not necessarily require proportionally less work. There are still compliance requirements, along with:
Processing
Underwriting
Technology
Appraisals
Disclosures
Quality control
Servicing considerations
Professional time
Many of those costs are relatively fixed whether someone borrows $80,000 or $500,000. That can make smaller mortgages less economical to originate, which creates a particularly frustrating situation: some of America’s least expensive homes can actually be among the hardest homes to finance efficiently.
We should fix that. But notice what happens if we do. We’ve made it easier to finance inexpensive housing. We haven’t created another inexpensive house. That distinction matters.
The same issue applies to VA lending
The new law also requires the standard mortgage application to make veterans more aware that they may qualify for a VA loan. I think that’s a good idea. Veterans who earned that benefit should know it exists, and better information can improve someone’s financing options enormously.
But again, that’s an improvement to access to financing. It isn’t an increase in housing production. Both things matter. They are simply not the same thing.
What about institutional investors?
The law also restricts certain purchases of single-family homes by very large institutional investors. That will probably be one of the more politically popular parts of the legislation, and there is a legitimate debate about the role institutional capital should play in single-family housing.
But I think blaming institutional investors for America’s broader affordability problem can become an easy distraction. Even if institutional investor activity fell considerably, we’d still have to answer the same fundamental question: Are we producing enough housing for the number of households that want it?
The final law also includes significant exceptions to the investor restrictions, including provisions protecting build-to-rent development. That distinction is important. An investor buying an existing home and an investor financing construction of 300 new homes aren’t economically the same activity. One competes for existing inventory. The other creates inventory. Housing policy should recognize the difference.
The harder conversation is construction
If we genuinely want to improve housing affordability, we need to become almost obsessive about the economics of creating housing:
Why does a project take years to approve?
Why can the same type of housing cost dramatically more to build in one jurisdiction than another?
Why has construction productivity improved so slowly compared with other industries?
How much does zoning constrain supply?
How much do permitting delays cost?
How much land is effectively unavailable for development?
Can modular construction materially reduce cost?
Can manufactured housing become a larger part of the solution?
How do we finance infrastructure for new communities?
How do we increase the skilled construction workforce?
Which regulations provide meaningful benefits, and which simply increase the cost of producing another housing unit?
Those aren’t easy questions. They’re considerably harder than announcing another buyer program. But that’s exactly why we need to spend more time on them.
I'm not arguing against homebuyer assistance
I want to be very clear about this. I’ve helped plenty of borrowers use assistance programs, and I’ve seen what they can do. For an individual household, the right program can be life-changing. A family that thought homeownership was three years away can sometimes purchase today. That’s meaningful.
We should improve those programs. We should expand financial education, make lending more efficient, solve the small-dollar mortgage problem, make sure veterans understand their benefits, and find responsible ways to help first-time buyers.
But none of those ideas changes the basic arithmetic of housing. If household formation consistently exceeds housing production in a market people want to live in, pressure builds somewhere. Prices rise. Rents rise. Commutes get longer. Families delay purchasing. People double up. Or people simply move somewhere else.
Financing can’t repeal supply and demand.
The mortgage industry should say this more often
Our industry naturally looks at housing through a financing lens. That’s our job. Someone has a housing problem, and we immediately start thinking about rates, loan programs, down payments, debt-to-income ratios and monthly payments. That’s valuable.
But it can also become a blind spot. Not every housing problem has a mortgage solution. Sometimes the mortgage works perfectly. There just aren’t enough houses.
The distinction that matters
So when someone tells me they want to make housing more affordable, I think we should ask one additional question: Do you mean making today’s homes easier to finance, or do you mean making housing itself more abundant and less expensive?
Because those aren’t interchangeable goals. One operates primarily through demand. The other requires addressing supply.
America should do both. Help responsible buyers access homeownership, and build dramatically more housing. Remove unnecessary friction from mortgage lending, and remove unnecessary friction from housing construction. Encourage innovation in finance, and encourage innovation in how we actually build. And stop pretending one side of that equation can substitute for the other.
Because the simplest way I can put it is this:
More financing helps buyers compete.
More housing gives buyers something to compete for.
I’ve built my career around the first. But if we’re serious about solving America’s housing affordability problem, we need a lot more of the second.
Eventually, somebody has to pour concrete.
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