Morning. It is Sunday, May 24th. I'm Ali Valsh, and here's a word you don't hear very often in Washington anymore. Agreement.

So when the House passed a major housing affordability bill this week by a vote of 396 to 13. It's worth asking, what exactly did Congress

just agree on? And does it actually matter? And will it have any effect on the cost of housing

in this country? The short answer is, yes, sort of. The longer answer is it's complicated. That's

okay, because we like complicated on this show.

The most spot-on response to these questions probably came from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren,

who described the bill as a policy meatball, stuffed with provisions championed by lawmakers on both sides,

with no single sweeping fix,

but a lot of ingredients that together she says make it, quote, delicious.

Okay, so what's in this housing legislation meatball?

At its core, the bill tries to address America's critical housing shortage

by cutting through some of the permitting and regulatory red tape that makes it painfully slow and

expensive to build homes. In many cities, getting approval to build a single house can take years

of environmental reviews, zoning hearings, and paperwork. This bill would speed parts of that

process up. It also expands support for manufactured or pre-made housing, and it funds pre-approved

home designs so communities can build faster and more cheaply. All of that is genuinely useful.

But the provision getting the most attention is the bill's restrictions on large corporate

landlords, and I'm talking about hedge funds and private equity firms and

institutional investors from buying additional single-family homes once they own more than 350 homes

already. And that reflects something real. When giant investors sweep into housing markets

paying all cash, it reduces supply. It makes that

reduced supply unaffordable. Ordinary families can't compete. And even if the pricing were fair,

...