Deadline for Trump to sign landmark housing bill coming to a close
By Fox 5 San Diego
On June 23, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed in the House of Representatives by a 358-32 vote. This followed the Senate’s 85-5 vote the day before.
Six days later, it was sent to President Trump’s desk. That’s where the bill has sat for a week and a half.
Trump originally planned to sign the bill, but canceled on June 24, telling Congress that he wouldn’t sign the ROAD Act until they passed the SAVE America Act, which includes voter ID laws that Trump has pushed for since his first campaign. However, the plan to use the ROAD Act as leverage is running out of time.
“If he doesn’t sign it in ten days, it automatically becomes law without a signature,” Rep. Scott Peters (D) said.
That 10-day clock expires at midnight on Friday, July 10, and Peters expects the bill to pass, whether it’s by signature or expiration.
For San Diego County, that means an acceleration of affordable housing programs. Buildings like Harrington Heights in East Village and SkyLINE in Rancho Bernardo are some recent affordable housing projects in the county, and more will be on the way.
At its core, the ROAD Act makes it easier for local and state governments to build affordable housing units, which housing experts say will alleviate the pressures that lead to homelessness.
“Homelessness is a housing problem,” said Stephen Russell, the CEO of the San Diego Housing Federation. “You see this progressive, downward pressure on the existing housing stock. What happens is people fall off the bottom rung and become homeless.”
It does this in two ways: First, it streamlines the environmental review process for affordable housing units.
“Today, if you want to do an affordable housing project with federal money, anything over a 10% contribution triggers a whole round of federal environmental review in addition to what is essentially the same environmental review at the state level,” Peters said. “This gets rid of that.”
The bill also eliminates red tape with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, allowing HUD to be more generous with funds.
For years, the process to create affordable housing has been hard on both the wallet and the watch, leaving some construction unfinished.
“It’s hard to measure how many projects were abandoned because people simply did not want to pursue them through this process,” Russell said.
On top of streamlining affordable housing construction, the bill also provides benefits to veterans when it comes to applying for home loans.
“We are a Navy town, and we’ve made a special effort here to house as many veterans as possible,” Russell said.
Veterans make up 6.5% of San Diego’s homeless population, and will get a double dose of assistance from the ROAD Act.