Rebecca Picciotto

It's the aesthetic pushback.

It's the traffic constraints.

It's the feeling that a city doesn't have the infrastructure to support new population that housing boom might bring in.

You're also seeing many developers experiment more with factory built housing because it's easier, cheaper, faster to build, and the technology has really advanced.

But these are not always architectural masterpieces, these modular apartment buildings and modular homes.

So you tend to see some resistance to that aesthetic disruption.

Exactly, exactly.

But at the end of the day, it does get the housing built more quickly.

And I think the technology is advancing in a way to try to make them a little prettier, but it's a work in progress.

Yeah, I think as we head into the early voting season for the midterms, affordability is at the top of every elected official's mind.

And as a result, every politician who is campaigning for office this November wants to show that they have a victory on housing.

This is now a political priority for many lawmakers in Washington.

And driving the affordability conversation is a sense that high housing costs are now reshaping the life milestones of the average American.

And so as a result, I think elected officials feel much more pressure from voters to get this house in order.

Yeah, what these bills have in common is they are pushing cities to build more.

The Senate bill specifically authorizes a program where certain cities that receive certain federal grant money, if they're behind in housing production, some of that federal funding could be revoked and transferred to cities that are building more.

They also are both taking on the federal government's environmental review process.

They are offering new exemptions for certain housing projects and overall trying to streamline the process.

And this is the federal government's version of what some states have already been pursuing themselves, like California and New York.

They are also trying to broaden manufactured and modular housing construction.