Construction workers build the wood frame of a new waterfront home in El Porto Beach, El Segundo, Calif., on Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) This week, Congress did something remarkable: it passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act with overwhelming bipartisan votes in the House and Senate, delivering the most significant housing legislation in decades. Then President Trump abruptly canceled the signing ceremony.
This is not a disagreement about housing policy. Republicans and Democrats agree this bill will lower costs and increase housing supply. It is the president holding hostage families who can’t afford rent, to a political demand his own party cannot fulfill.
The president needs to stop this and sign the housing bill.
If this bill becomes law, it will be a massive victory for every American struggling with the cost of housing. But the truth is that the real work of what comes next will largely happen at the local level, in city halls and zoning boards, by mayors who’ve been quietly laying the groundwork while waiting for Washington to catch up.
Most American cities today face a significant and growing housing shortage.
Cincinnati’s story is not unique. Although we have grown in recent years, our housing supply is still more than 40,000 units short. This shortage has been compounded by decades of restrictive single-family zoning, construction costs that have outrun wages, and a wave of institutional investors buying up single-family properties, neglecting their maintenance, and passing the burden to their tenants. The result: rent growth in Cincinnati is now outpacing most peer cities across the country.
The conventional response has been to wait for Washington, but we tried something different.
We created our city’s first sustainable revenue stream for a $100 million Affordable Housing Trust Fund, filling gaps private capital won’t touch. Within two years, it led to a tripling of affordable-unit production. We redirected home-repair dollars to neighborhoods that earlier generations of policy had written off. And we delivered the most comprehensive rezoning in our city’s modern history, opening transit corridors and neighborhood business districts to multi-family and “missing middle” housing.
Cincinnati is the first city in Ohio to make those structural changes. The early signals from developers and lenders are what we hoped for: certainty produces investment.
But those moves also expose the limits of local government. A city of 315,000 cannot single-handedly fix a national market. We can rewrite our zoning code; we cannot rewrite the federal tax code or stop a hedge fund three states away from buying a thousand homes on our blocks. That is why the federal tools in play right now matter, and why mayors need to be positioned to use them.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is one of the few bills in Washington that takes that posture seriously. It cuts regulatory friction for cities willing to build. It expands financing tools tied to actual production. And it takes on the institutional-investor model hollowing out homeownership in places like Cincinnati, where corporate landlord activity has driven displacement and rent growth faster than almost anywhere else in the country. The bill does all of this without new mandatory federal spending — a framework leaders across the aisle and housing advocates alike should be able to support.
What it does not do is impose a federal blueprint on local conditions. The cities making real progress on housing — Minneapolis, Austin, and now Cincinnati – got there by reforming their own rules, not by waiting for a federal template. Washington’s most useful role is not to direct that work but to reward it.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has passed Congress. If it becomes law, members of both parties across the ideological spectrum deserve credit, from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to Tim Scott (R-S.C.). The cities that will benefit most from federal housing investment are the ones that have already done the homework. They have updated their zoning codes, stood up housing offices with real capacity, identified where gap financing is needed, and built the developer relationships that turn new tools into new units. Cincinnati started that work years ago. Every city should start now.
Mayors are the ones who hear from families priced out of neighborhoods their grandparents built. We are the ones answering for the high rents, the waitlists, and the displacement. We don’t have the luxury of ideology, and we don’t have time to wait for the next election cycle. We have constituents who need places to live, budgets that don’t balance themselves, and developers who need certainty before they break ground. This bill could help meaningfully boost all of that work, but only if we’re ready to put it to use.
This housing bill is a rare win that Trump deliver for every American. It is bipartisan, bicameral and ready to sign. His constituents need him to pick up the pen and sign it.
Aftab Pureval is the 70th mayor of Cincinnati.
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